¶ 1Leave a comment on paragraph 10
Thank you for taking the time to review this proposed new map of MLA groups. The proposal is closed to new comments. We invite you to learn more about the next steps in the process here.

¶ 3Leave a comment on paragraph 31
As you view the map, you can comment on a particular group by clicking on the adjacent speech bubble or leave a general comment by clicking on “Comments on the whole page.” You will need to log in to the Commons to comment.

¶ 4Leave a comment on paragraph 40
On this new map, groups are clustered into six broad thematic categories, listed alphabetically. Groups are arranged alphabetically or chronologically within those categories. Note that we propose that groups do one of the following: keep the same name as before, be renamed, be divided, or be reconceptualized or amalgamated. (In some cases we are presenting you with a choice of group name or configuration.)

The American Literature Section is not a Division or Discussion Group. It has its origins early in the 20th Century when the MLA had “Sections” rather than “Divisions” and “Discussion Groups.” It has an independent dues structure and publications. See http://als-mla.org. Please note that the MLA does not maintain als-mla.org, nor does the MLA approve its content, dues structure, and so on.

I’m trying to comment on the whole set of categories, but can’t quite figure out how to do so without hitting a specific “reply to x” button. So here goes, anyway …

Overall, I think the changes are excellent: they make vernacular sense and are congruent with how people talk about what they do; they are clear and simple. Some excellent and much-needed additions are: Digital Humanities (how big will this thing get?), Global English (terrific and provocative). I much prefer “The Profession and the Academy” to what it had been previously (even though it sounds a bit like a wry comedy, which it perhaps is). The whole “Transdisciplinary Connections” section is useful and sound.

I was struck by one of the comments (Andrew Parker, I believe) about the mapping by bodies of water (Atlantic, Pacific, Caribbean…). I like that, too, certainly found it intriguing; it jarred me into thinking differently about literary/cultural/historical connections or their absence. My one surprise–and perhaps concern–is the disappearance of “Europe” as a place of cultural/literary/historica/social relations that are meaningful enough for us to take note of specifically. Is it no longer that?

I am replying to Angela because I too can’t figure out where to comment on the whole document/concept. Short version: I think this new group structure is useful, provides some long overdue updating of our categories, and it looks carefully thought through. I am not sure I understand why some categories have a blue and green option, but I’ll go back to the introductory materials. Thanks to all for their work on this!

It seems to me that in general the committee has done an excellent job in trying to make room for new areas, especially when there are so many potentially contentious issues about how to divide and name our many possible areas of interest. It does seem to me, though, that with so many relatively small domains being created, we should think about some of the larger ones. For instance, there is no group for Literary Theory, which has been very important in the history of MLA. Perhaps this is supposed to be covered by Philosophical Approaches to Literature and the other approaches, but there are many issues that do not fall easily under a the approach to literature through another discipline. If we were to agree that the task of the Literary Criticism group is to organize programs on literary theory, that would be a solution, but that group’s remit is much broader and it would seem unfair to charge them with a narrower function than their name suggests. So what about a group on Literary Theory?

A number of people have made the case for a separate group on Theory, to be named, as you suggest, “Literary Theory” or “Literary and Cultural Theory.” Note that we have proposed to rename the “Approaches” groups.

The ethnically based groups in the American category seem arbitrary. Italian and Jewish but not Irish? African and Asian American include Diasporic but Jewish American does not? All of these groups have greater weight than The American South or other regional groups? I would rather see the divisions made on the basis of period and region. (I have similar concerns in other areas.)

Several of us on the Luso-Brazilian division(s) are wondering where Portugal fits, and if it would be possible to propose at this point either a division on Portugal or request the rationale for its apparent exclusion. Thanks!

The proposal is meant not to eliminate but to strengthen the presence of Portuguese, with two full Lusophone groups, the more expanded category of Iberian (certainly not identical to Spanish), and the new groups, Mediterranean and Atlantic. Our general aim was to focus on language and region, rather than nation, as categories. Thank you for your constructive comments, though.

In general I share the concern regarding Portugal. Not only because it seems to be excluded, but also because “Iberian” has replaced “Hispanic” and “Spanish”, but the content has not changed, and looks like, here, “Iberian” is just another name of Spain.

I applaud the hard work that went into this reconfiguration and believe that several of these newer groups (“Digital Humanities,” for example) and the transnational turn in several cases accurately reflect the state of the discipline.

However, the grouping of “Late-19th- and Early-20th-Century American” and “Late-19th- and Early-Twentieth-Century British” into “Transatlantic Late-19th- and Early-20th-Century” is somewhat puzzling, given that both earlier and later national periods for both British and American are represented as individual groups. Although the transatlantic connections are strong, the texts and issues for both literatures are significant in this era and deserve to be read within a national as well as transnational context, as is the case with the current groups.

I agree with Donna. I’d say the problem here is that 1) not everyone who does British and American do Transatlantic studies, yet 2) many Transatlantic scholars may identify primarily/secondarily as either American or British. I don’t know how this should be reflected in the discussion groups.

To me, this is the most significant and positive development in the MLA structure in the 24 years that I have been a member. I applaud the work of the co-chairs and the committee. In particular, I would like to draw my colleagues’ attention to the fact that the newly proposed structure gives much more space to Asian languages, something that desperately needed to be done. I know there are a lot of other developments as well, but for those who do not work on Asia I would kindly ask that you note that and offer your support. A more inclusive, more diverse MLA is good for all of us. Thank you!

Generally I think that this is a very positive and carefully thought out revision.

My one serious qualm is that the appendage of Media Studies to the previous Genre Studies category seems arbitrary. The inclusion of Media Studies as a repeated subfield under the heading of Genre and Media Studies indicates that something is amiss here. And why should Life Writing or Folklore, for example, appear in the same category as Media Studies or Digital Humanities?

Perhaps Media/Technology Studies is now a significant enough field (with its own hiring category) to merit a category of its own?

The subfields under such a category might include:

Book History and Print Culture
Cinema and the Moving Image
Digital Humanities
Media Philosophy
Science and Technology Studies
Video Game Studies

—

Note that “Science and Technology Studies” is currently included under “Transdisciplinary Connections.” But the properly interdisciplinary subfield would be Science and Literature (which has its own organization, the SLSA, and annual conference). So I think “Science and Technology Studies” would be more appropriately included in a discrete “Media/Technology Studies” category.

This is a really interesting idea. I wondered too about Media Studies’ position under its own category, and I agree that some straggler fields could be subsumed under that. As we proposed under the Rhet/Comp category to make it it’s own theme, it might also work under a Media Studies header on its own. Maybe.

I am of two minds. I regret losing the more traditional areas. But it might make for a more exciting convention, convention sessions that people will attend in larger numbers than heretofore and fit more with how literary study is actually pursued these days.

I do think the eighteenth century and later nineteenth century (Anglophone) are shortchanged. Canonical US writers will also be underexposed, in ways that do not serve the MLA’s interests. Nobody wants newspaper articles saying there is no Henry James or Dryden at MLA. There is no mention of any literature from Australia, New Zealand, or the South Pacific. With these tweaks, I think it is generally a good structure, but there must be tweaks.

We don’t intend for traditional areas to be “lost”! They are almost all there on the map as “groups”–some with new names which are still subject to discussion. If you could tell me which areas in particular you are not finding, I will be happy to discuss them with you.

But it’s interesting to see that some commentators are offering such descriptions to the readers of this discussion! Perhaps “narrative descriptions” of groups could be something that executive committees could produce with members’ input? If I were a new member considering joining my first seven groups, I’d love to see such narrative descriptions on the Commons.

” . . . at this time”: Does that mean that there will be some such narrative description provided for later on? That would be helpful. Some of us have been discussing (off-line) the effacement of the Lexicography category. Certainly a place can be made for Lexicography within Book History and Print Culture — the “philological-lexicographic revolution” indeed having epitomized “print capitalism” (in B. Anderson’s terms of analysis) — but if there is no place in which to name it, it will go unnoticed.

I am grateful for the hard work of the committee, and I see many advantages to the new divisions. I will, however, here, concentrate on one of the problems I find with this new map, the glaring absence of theory. I recognize that literary theory is no longer as dominant a discourse as it once was, but the fact of its previous dominance means that it continues to be significant. Historically, “Literary Criticism” was the division most linked to theory, but “literary criticism,” especially as a genre, is not at all the same as theory. One can, of course, study the genre of literary criticism, so it is not inappropriate for that division to continue to be so located. But much of discourse of theory has not been part of this genre. I would urge a separate division called “theory.” It should not be called “literary theory,” because as the many divisions in the new map that do not deal with literature suggest, theory needs to be understood more broadly.

I will make this comment elsewhere, but I strongly second David Shumway’s point that Theory needs to be a part of this updating of the field. It may be the case that the previous “philosophical approaches to literature,” “anthropological approaches to literature” etc. and their new replacements etc. were/are meant to cover theory, but those categories could equally be taken in more text-based directions that don’t result in sessions on Theory. Moreover, the parcelling out of theory between “philosophical,” “anthropological,” “psychological” etc ignores the interdisciplinary nature of Theory as a place where these approaches come together. Also, we do need a group in which Theory is studied in itself and not just as it can be applied to or connected with literature.

I very much agree with David. Back in 1974, “theory” had not quite hit the MLA. Now it is so everywhere, it’s invisible. It would not do justice to what has happened to our profession to allow these 40 years be a jump from “too early” to “too late” to inscribe the place of theory in the MLA.

Most departments have a grad & an undergrad theory survey. And theory is not “criticism.”

And I agree with what Tilottama says below [excuse my mispositioning] that we need a place for those of us who study theory in and of itself, and not just apply it to literature and other cultural objects. There are still a lot of us around, even if this trend is 30 years old.

I’m not sure if this group belongs in the “genre” theme or the “transdisciplinary” theme, but it belongs on the map!

Thanks to those who have suggested a separate group on Theory. The working group had certainly considered this and will appreciate your input. I hope you will volunteer to conceptualize such a group when the time comes.

Good riddance to “Literary Research” and “Bibliography.” Most MLA members don’t even bother to read the texts provided by textual scholars anyway, and any research is mostly a waste of time for a body of people who pretty much know everything already. And even better–getting rid of all this work stuff will make writing papers for MLA a lot easier.

“Bibliography” is not dead in the new map but doubly alive albeit in two newly named groups. Please take a look at the new group called “Book History and Print Culture,” and also at a new group that has two possible names in the current draft: Library and Archive Studies OR Print, Digital, and Information Culture. This second group also houses what used to be called “Libraries and Research in Languages and Literatures.” We would welcome your views on these names and reconfigurations. Another commenter on this site, Alison Muri, has raised the question, “Would Bibliography, Editing, and Textual Studies work as a category?”

Kudos to the Committee, first of all, for their exceptionally thoughtful and provocative work. The proposed new map is indeed a map, a way of making literary and cultural geography as salient as history for our teaching and research. I like in particular the categories organized by bodies of water, which, better than any of our longstanding rubrics, make room for the many kinds of comparativism practiced today.

As a few of the commentators point out, some fine-tuning may be needed to clarify distinctions or eliminate redundancy. David Shumway raises a very good question about theory’s place in the new schema (is it local, global, both, neither)?

Overall, however, the proposal seems to get many things right. Imagine going to a Convention organized differently! The new map helped me do just that.

In general, I am happy with the new mapping, but I do wonder about the splitting of the African Literatures group into Southern Africa and Africa South of the Sahara. Why is North Africa being cut off? Many of us who teach in African studies try to get our students to understand that the Sahara has always been a bridge and not a barrier between the North and the South. Also, cutting the North off tends to heighten often unspoken but nevertheless prevalent “racializations” of Africa that are unfortunate. If we think that African literature needs more space than one group I would support four regional groups — Northern Africa, Eastern Africa, Southern Africa and Western Africa. But to carve it as currently proposed seems inappropriate to me. I would love for my fellow Africanists to weigh in on this.

This has indeed been one of the areas we have given lots of thought to. Short of splitting one small group into four, do you have another suggestion? The advice we got is that North Africa is often taught under francophone, also Arabic and will fit with Mediterranean.

I agree with the comments above about Africa. Arabic is an African language. Arabic is also a major Jewish language, esp. in the medieval period. Hebrew today is not only a Jewish language today. There are major writers in Hebrew (Anton Shammas, Sayyed Qashua) who are not Jewish and Israel has significant minority populations today whose first language is Hebrew who are not Jewish. The categories listed are fairly traditional and reflect how these languages and regions are commonly treated and studied, but they are also highly political and do not necessarily reflect how we may want them to be studied in the future.

One thing that is not clear to me is whether the groupings have any organizational meaning. Do the larger categories such as “African” or “Asian” have any representation in the structure of the organization or are they just groupings of convenience so that people can easily find things that interest them? Is there any reason why Arabic, for instance, can’t be included under the categories Africa, Asia, and Jewish as well as “Arabic?” or Francophone appear under Caribbean, Africa, Asia, etc.? Or, could the groups be represented through a network of connections rather than divisions? Some nodes in the network would have many spokes connecting them to other groups.

Great questions, thank you! The larger categories are indeed groupings “of convenience”–but I’d also say that they’re also meant as provocations to thought and to further discussion. No taxonomic scheme will satisfy all stakeholders, but this one, when it emerges, will (we hope) be more fluid than the previous ones because of the 5 year reviews; the opportunities for members to form “3 year” groups that would would rise, subside, and/or perhaps morph into another group; and of course the opportunities that the Commons provides for members to communicate frequently with the elected representatives of their (several) groups. The idea of representing the MLA’s intellectual groups through a “network of connections” is very interesting to me and invites us all to think more about how an organization’s structure can be figured differently on a website than on a printed page.

I would be happy to retain the current designation as “African Literatures.” However, if the idea is to allow African literature more space on the program than would be possible under just this one heading (but not wanting four), I would suggest a historical split. The split could take place in many ways. Some might want “African Literatures before 1960” and “African Literatures after 1960” to mark the moment when many African nations achieved independence. My own suggestion would be to make the split at 1990 instead. In ways that we are still coming to terms with, the formal end of the Cold War allowed for new imaginaries on the continent and its literature. This was also a moment when writers and critics began to re-think the nature of the postcolonial nation in a way that wasn’t wedded to the earlier anti-colonial, high nationalist moment. My reading is, of course, subject to debate and critique and not all my colleagues will want to link African literary history to the Cold War. Nonetheless, if we need to have two groups rather than one (if only so that there is sufficient space at the convention for African literary studies), then a chronological rather than geographical divide seems to make the most sense to me. One final thought on this — making the split at 1990 as opposed to the 60’s also has the advantage of ensuring a relatively even spread in terms of the current scholarly energies and production that we are witnessing. Making the split in 1960 will, I predict create two groups who will have radically uneven membership (many fewer signing up for pre-1960). In sum, if I were to propose a model that ended up with two groups rather than either one or four, I would propose “African Literatures before 1990” and “African Literatures since 1990.” Once again, I encourage my fellow Africanists to chime in on this.

The new mapping is an excellent initiative and I am thankful to the MLA for its work of this project. As Gaurav G. Desai points out, however, the division between “African” and “Arabic” is unfortunate. It is as if there were an “Arabic” and a “Non-Arabic” Africa, which is problematic. In addition, with this new division—which also contradicts the cultural, religious and commercial ties between sub-Saharan and North Africa— where would, let’s say, Djibouti or Madagascar be mapped? In the “French” section, under “Francophone”? This subcategory of metropolitan French is also unfortunate. To me, the four regional groups Desai suggests would be more suitable, and it would be preferable that “Francophone” not be under “French.”

Just a note that northern African studies should have strong links to Iberian/Spanish studies with regard to literary and filmic representations of immigration, migration, identity and nation/citizenship. I would welcome an organized space of discussion either within “Iberian” or within “African” for attention to Northern African-Iberian issues.

I am curious about the justification of omitting any reference to the study of southern literature, which is thriving, or (frankly) any acknowledgement of other regional literatures of the United States. Regional literatures within the U.S. are alive and vital, but the study of this writing is not likely to show up very often on the program (except through the panels sponsored by allied organizations) unless space is created on this map for them. (Although the term “Regional” appears on this map, it appears under CLCS and is clearly not intended to reference U.S. literary regions.) I have been attending MLA for years, and the sessions on southern literature are extraordinarily well attended. American Literature has done special issues on the subject within the past few years; work in the field has appeared in major national journals like PMLA and in American Literary History on several occasions recently. New work on the global U.S. South, the U.S. South and Hemispheric Studies, and the “new southern studies” makes this field quite exciting. Nevertheless, these proposed groupings, in their omission of geographically based literary study within the U.S., promise to marginalize a large number of scholars and some very innovative work.

And doesn’t this new “map” make the continued existence of “regional” MLA groups (NEMLA, SAMLA, SCMLA, and so on) seem a bit strange?

Regional MLA associations like NEMLA, SAMLA, SCMLA, and so on are separate entities. They are incorporated independently, and there is no governance link between these associations and the MLA. Since they are not within our divisional structure, they are not included in this proposal. Thank you for raising the issue.

While I understand thatRegional MLA associations are separate entities, I think Barbara Ladd’s point about the absence of all U.S. regional literature needs more serious consideration. The literature and culture of the American South is much studied and written about, and the literatures of place (Great Lakes literature for example) is thriving as well. I share Professor Ladd’s concern that not making actual space for southern literature and the literature of other U.S. regions greatly decreases the likelihood that the MLA, our central organization, will encourage the presence of panels on U.S. regional literature. I also agree with Hester Blum’s comment on the new additions to the CLCS categories. Why not create space for other literatures of place?

There is a discussion of the future of the Southern Literature Discussion Group ongoing on a listserv devoted to southern literary study. While I am part of that discussion, I do think it will be unfortunate if the larger question–the future of the study of U.S. literary and cultural regionalisms more broadly–is subsumed under that discussion. I hope that members who study U.S. regionalisms, the literatures of the Southwest, Northwest, Great Lakes, Midwest, and so on, will participate in this discussion. It seems to me to be very important to see a group under the American Literature LLC category devoted to geographically-based and place-based studies.

As a member who hoped the committee would consider adding more categories that serve as alternatives to nation- or century-based divisions, I am delighted to see the new oceanic and supranational groups in the CLCS categories–Atlantic, Caribbean, Global South, Hemispheric, Indian, Mediterranean, and Pacific. Such groups seem to me both ideologically necessary and intellectually productive.

I do share the concerns that colleagues have expressed about the “Regional” designation, however. I would love more of a sense of what the MLA was envisioning for this group.

A couple of points: I’d like to add my voice to concerns over losing the English Restoration as a discrete period. It’s just so important to an understanding of literary history in Britain, but not only in Britain. And could you spell out your thinking about the new “Pacific” group? I understand it as joining the geographical and oceanic turn in your classificatory system. But it seems to me that this is turn more interventionist and perhaps less useful for the Pacific than for the Atlantic say, which already has a body of scholarship organized around it. Australia, for instance, does not usually think of itself as in the Pacific at all, although technically bits of it are I guess? (The body of water between it and NZ is known as the Bass Straight, the north east coast is on the Coral Sea). South Pacific means the South Pacific Islands, with NZ joining only at a push. And the Pacific without a qualifier usually means the North American West Coast too. So if you take the Pacific literally it Americanizes the region, and describes a space with few literary interactions and little sense of itself as such. If you don’t and include Australia, it just seems a bit odd. For all that, I understand the Committee’s thinking. But it may be worth reconsidering the classification. The obvious alternative: an “Australasian” or “Australia and New Zealand” group which would leave South Pacific Island writings in “Indigenous Literatures” has its downside too, but would probably be more attractive to the many Australian and New Zealand scholars who connect up to the MLA and have vital lineages built around the idea of their nations on something like the American model. I’d be interested to hear if others share my concerns.

I realize now that this post is confused, my apologies for that. The Pacific section is for comparative studies not for Anglophone which has a section with a new name “Anglophone other than British and American” that will cover Australian and NZ literature.

Simon, as a thought experiment: Would you and other 18th century British colleagues consider a title such as “Restoration and Eighteenth Century Literature” for an amalgamated group? From what we’ve read so far, the option of amalgamating is unanimously despised by specialists in 18th century English fields, and that’s been an important, indeed remarkable, communication to the Working Group. Names, however, are hugely important and our initial suggestions for name changes can be, and already have been, improved upon.

I’d also like to remind readers of these posts that all MLA divisions currently have TWO guaranteed sessions. So the 18th century and Restoration in England currently has four guaranteed sessions. For some updated thoughts about the several factors that will figure in the Program Committee’s decisions about the allocation of sessions to groups coming up for their regular five- year reviews henceforth, please see the note to MLA members that Marianne and I posted today. We have learned a great deal from reading your comments, and are eager to hear from members who haven’t yet participated; we also welcome more thoughts from those of you who’ve already posted on this site.

I applaud the MLA executive committee for undertaking a revision on the old MLA group structure. In general, I think this draft group structure is a positive step.

However, I am rather frustrated that there is still no “Persian” group under the “Languages, Literatures, and Cultures” heading. As a comparative literature PhD student who primarily works on Persian literature, I am not sure where I or other Persianists fit in this new group scheme (nor, for that matter, did we have any place in the old system either). I communicated my frustration about this in writing to MLA staff members last year and they said it would be taken into consideration in this revision of the old discussion group/division system.

I am not trying to place all of the blame for this omission on the MLA. I am certain that a large part of the reason “Persian” has not been represented in either version of the MLA group structure is because of the low number of Persian literary scholars involved in the MLA. However, there a growing number of us who are quite interested in being actively involved in the MLA (we have organized/participated in a number of special sessions/panels recently at both the MLA general convention and regional MLA conventions) and we are attempting to recruit other Persian literary scholars/grad students to get more involved as well. But it is difficult to get other Persianists excited about an organization whose organizational structure does not even recognize that they exist as a literary and cultural tradition.

Although Persian literature and culture has been typically underrepresented in the U.S. academe (and professional organizations), it is by no means a peripheral literary and cultural tradition historically speaking. Throughout the medieval and early modern period it was the prestige and imperial language of the Mughal (Indian) empire, the Safavid empire, and a host of other smaller kingdoms spanning from the western border of China to the eastern parts of Europe (even as late as the early 19th century in the case of the Mughal empire). And, of course, it also later became the “national” language of Iran, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan.

I don’t mean to sound like a Persian cultural chauvinist here, but I do want to stress to the MLA executive committee the importance of Persian as one of the major world literary and cultural traditions in hopes that you will consider adding it as one of the groups in this revision of the MLA group structure. I will gladly volunteer to help in the formation of this group, and I know several others who would be interested in being involved in this process as well. Again, I want to stress that I think this present revision is definitely a good step in the right direction, but I would hope that you would consider adding “Persian” as well. Thank you for your hard work, time and consideration!

After several fruitful conversations with fellow Persianists over the last month, I think there is a substantial group of us that is very interested in making a commitment to a three-year seminar and working to build a strong Persian Lang/Lit presence at MLA.

It seems that the process for forming three-year seminars (which you mentioned above as a possibility) and new groups is still being worked out. So I guess our question for you is what steps can we begin to take now to begin these processes?

Thank you sincerely for an amazing effort. The only issue I would raise is that which Mr. Matthew Miller has very thoroughly and eloquently raised before me. Given the diversity of the groups, the addition of Persian or Farsi literatures would not only open the doors for much needed conversations, but it would also invite a larger host of academics to the MLA, and I strongly believe such an addition will be welcomed with much enthusiasm by the scores of scholars who work on such literatures, including myself.

Again, thank you for the energy that you have put into what I can imagine has been an incredibly extensive and time-consuming project!

I share similar concerns with the other commentators on the proposed division of African literature. As has been raised, the designation of “southern African literature” is a thinly veiled prioritizing of South African literature and continues a troubling history of viewing South Africa as exceptional. Secondly, the view that the Sahara acts as a barrier, that the so-called sub-continent was/is isolated is perhaps the other most troubling aspect of the proposed division—it’s of great concern to see the MLA inadvertently re-instate this hegemonic moniker. One would hope that a new formation or structure to the African literature section would act to open up space for more conversation, that it not exist as it has at the margins. Some of the other proposed divisions do just that, and should be applauded, but alas the division on African literatures and languages seems to falter. A periodization (old-fashioned as it may be) could be a start: pre-1960, 1960-1990, and post-1990. Or a regional division—north, east and west as well as south Africa. Yet these divisions have their drawbacks—for example the lack of recognition of the diaspora. Perhaps at the root of this is the notion that there is indeed one “Africa”—we don’t assume that of the Americas, Europe, or Asia. To a large degree Africanists need to assert their places in Atlantic, Arabic or Mediterranean studies, for example; but, the association has a structural responsibility to create a framework that is open and supportive of scholars. Clearly, the overhaul of the MLA groups was a complicated and demanding process–I would urge the MLA to revisit the structuring of African literature and languages.

I am sharing this message from a friend (who posted it on FB), who is not a member of MLA. In fact, a whole lot of my friends in the profession are not members of the MLA, in large part because of the committee structure which leaves rhetoricians feeling completely alienated and unwelcome. Our message has been, for the thirty years I’ve been a member of MLA, consistently uninviting. I had hoped that this revision might take into account what the profession really looks like in 2013. I’ll note, before I turn to quoting my friend that there is only ONE group here dedicated to Rhetoric, Composition, and Writing Studies, as if that were a tiny part of what English Studies is today, and as if they were one field. Here’s what my friend posted on FB:

“Many friends in my feed have already written this post today. There’s over 150 proposed literary groups. There’s one group for “rhetoric, composition, and writing studies.” This alienates many of us working in R/C. I am not a member of MLA, so I cannot log-in to leave a comment. Could I, I would write something like this:

“[Another friend in RC] pointed out 20 of the 230 jobs on the MLA JIL are in business or technical writing, but this designation doesn’t appear on the list. Nor is there a designation for Computers and Writing (and, no, Digital Humanities and Computers and Writing are not necessarily the same things). If you are going to make so many fine distinctions for other areas, then it makes sense to think of Rhetorical Theory and Composition Theory as distinct areas. It might even make sense to divide Rhetorical Theory into chronological areas (at least into two: Classical and Contemporary). Composition theory could also be divided into some of its major concerns (Program Administration and Assessment comes immediately to mind). I don’t know whether Rhetoric of Science should be differentiated from Science and Technology studies. These are just a few suggestions I could think of off the top of my head.

“Again, I am not a member of MLA–I don’t know how many of my FB friends are. Outside of the job search, there is little incentive for R/C scholars to participate in MLA. But the fact that Iberian literature* has 7 proposed areas while R/C gets shoved into a sub-area for “Language Studies” suggests why we don’t put more energy into participating in MLA.

Similar to Diane Price Herndl’s concern about the very limited place for rhetoricians in the MLA, there is also an area important for literary study that seems to be entirely missing from this structure. There seems to be no place in the MLA for those asking broad questions about how and why literary texts are “used,” questions that are necessary to aid in understanding and articulating literature’s role in society. It seems that the processes and practices involved in engaging with fiction, poetry, and drama of all kinds, and the effects of such engagements, remain invisible and taken for granted with the MLA. Scholars do take on such issues in various ways–like Rita Felski in Uses of Literature or, earlier, Wayne Booth in The Company WeKeep, and through associations like the Reception Study Society and the International Society for the Study of Narrative–but there is no place within MLA for those focused on these issues. It seems literary studies is divided into smaller and smaller parts, and as a result there is little attention paid to important, wider questions regarding what happens when we read literary texts. (The omission is even more glaring on the job market as ads for literature jobs tend to focus on increasingly narrow periods or regions.)

The one MLA group of which I’m aware that is working on questions of what reading literature does is Cognitive Studies and Literature, but cognitive studies is only one approach to these questions and a variety of other approaches are warranted as well. It seems that a broader classification would be helpful in keeping the MLA relevant to the range of scholarly interests regarding literature.

As an addition to my earlier post, I’d like to support the discussion above about the need for a group focused on literary and cultural theory. This group would be a valuable step toward addressing the gap I see.

I appreciate the delicate work and careful reflection that have gone into the proposed map, and it’s very exciting to think about the ways in which the MLA can best represent our evolving discipline. I have three concerns, however. First, I am not sure what to make of the claim that “nations and periods” are somehow more inherently restrictive than other sorts of classifications, or that they are less significant in contemporary scholarship. Surely contextualization—historical, cultural, linguistic—continues to play a role in much of the scholarly production in literary studies. Second: Although I am not a member of either division, I would like to support the arguments that many have made against merging the divisions of Restoration/Early 18th-Century and Late 18th-Century British Literature. As many have pointed out, these are vibrant and quite distinct areas. Both are certainly open to an ongoing, interdisciplinary, and transnational conversation that is the field of 18th-century studies. As a longtime member and immediate past president of the American Society for 18th-Century Studies, a thriving interdisciplinary organization and MLA affiliate, I have learned much over the years from colleagues in other national literatures, intellectual and social history, and the arts. (My area of specialization is in French studies.) I do not think that the MLA gains by conflating these areas: the proposed configuration simply reduces dramatically the number of program slots available to the large number of scholars and graduate students working in these areas.
My last point is simply to raise the question of the overall configuration of future programs and the ratio of “group” slots to special sessions. About 15 years ago, the Delegate Assembly took up the question of restricting the numbers of sessions organized by divisions in order to allow more special sessions. A number of us pointed out that at least the divisions were accountable to their memberships and required to issue calls for papers, whereas special sessions were not. I haven’t done the math to see if the proposed configuration, which has a longer list of “groups” not all of which however will have two guaranteed slots, would retain or change the overall ratio of MLA “groups” to special sessions. It would be helpful to know which groups would in fact be guaranteed two slots. Even so, it’s clear from reading the list that some fields (such as the British literature colleagues mentioned above) would be disproportionately underrepresented under the new configuration.

I also feel that British literature has suffered in this remapping from a geographical equity that ignores the fact that we are dealing with 8+ centuries here. In addition to the 18thc, which has received considerable feedback, the amalgamation of British 16th and 17th leaves Renaissance/early modern lopsidedly impoverished in relation to British AngloSaxon and Medieval and in relation to its French equivalents (where 16th and 17th are still recognized as significantly different). The amalgamation of late 19thc and early 20thc British and American under the rubric of “transatlantic” is also problematic. Late Victorian and Edwardian literature logically belong within British literature and there is nothing transatlantic about them. On the other hand, the British vs. American separation makes less sense with regard to Modernism, where one might want to put Eliot, Pound, and Stevens together with Woolf. But that isn’t to say that the transatlantic issue is at the core of their work. I’m not sure what this amalgamation was meant to address. It seems like an efficiency measure that hasn’t been thought through.

In the main, I think the changes are positive and move towards inclusiveness. I’d underscore others who challenge the loss of theory as a category and the the collapse of Restoration and Eighteenth Century. I do find the fact that the stakes of the changes are most fully articulated in the FAQ, coupled with the fact that comments are not invited there to be somewhat disconcerting. Surely the principles behind the changes merit commentary! In particular, I join others who worry about tying guaranteed sessions to numbers of self-identifying members, which contains future change. To help others gain a 30,000 foot view, how many guaranteed sessions is the MLA looking to have, and what is the rationale of that? And what are the maximum number of total sessions permitted? Would it be feasible to have members vote on some of the sessions they most would like to have? This at least would allow for the mobility of curiosity.

Using “German” as the division names instead of “germanophone” perpetuates the total exclusion of Austria, Switzerland, and other regions (e.g. parts of the USA in prior centuries, South Tirol) from the face of the MLA. It also perpetuates the politics of the Cold War and naturalizes as cultural sphere a form of a current nation-state rather than the more inclusive term germanophone, parallel to the move made by Lusophone. “German” versus “germanphone” cultural regions is not like the distinction between “French” and “Francophone” in terms of dominance. Before 1871, speakers of German could not live in “Germany” because it did not exist; a large number of authors included in “German” literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are Austrian or Swiss or one-time citizens of the German Democratic Republic (the lost East Germany). To keep the term “German” retains the cultural imperialism of the German-nationalist historiography of the pre-World-War-1 nascent German Empire, and allows “German studies” to continue to efface a vibrant field of Austrian Studies, the possibility of a German-American Studies, and Swiss studies. Critically, it also allows scholars to continue to ignore the diverse cultural histories of a large region of Europe OUTSIDE “Germany” and often only part of it because of expansionism and imperialism and thus keep our “studies” in a laughable relationship to real cultural and political processes. Have we not gotten over Kaiser Wilhelm yet?

Thanks for considering it. “German” studies taking Kafka et al. as Germans is as conceptually offensive as including Irish under British, no matter that the existing literary histories for “German” literature fairly uncritically allow the two into one category. Occupation armies have written those scripts. To say nothing of other “German” (germanophone) cultures like those of Nobel Prize winner Herta Müller. NOT “German” but “German-Romanian”; “German-Turkish” does not have to include only those writing in Germany. Most of the twentieth century’s significant female writers were/are Austrian or East German — an omission that the Federal Republic might want to consider, and scholars of it, as well. This is NOT a small issue — it speaks to the core of a viable cultural studies for germanophone regions.

The lack of acknowledgment of alternate social and political structures in the various germanophone countries has become increasingly problematic, and the shift would signal a willingness to get over the habits of mind inculcated in a World War II generation by the need to rescue “German” culture from Hitler’s Germany, no matter what the cost to geography and cultural heritages.

I appreciate very much this thread about “German” vs. “Germanophone” and add that we have this problem in the German Studies Association all the time. That interdisciplinary organization does very much try to include topics, sessions, guest speakers on Austrian and Swiss and other German-speaking communities, but whenever we say our name, we need to make clear that we mean all these other areas and communities. I like the idea of “Germanophone” just fine, even as I don’t really like the sound of the word itself. Thanks, Katie, for making sure this was added to the comments here.

Regarding the Transdisciplinary Connections section, there is a group that I feel could be added (and I couldn’t comment on the title of that section so I’m putting it here): Editing and Publishing Studies

Several commenters in the Genre and Media Studies category, particularly under the Book History and Print Culture group, indicated their sadness that editorial work was missing from that group’s title now. I pointed out there that editorial work doesn’t always means the same thing across different subdisciplines of MLA — that the “scholarly editing” one does to prepare a varorium or do similar Bibliography and Textual Studies work — is not the same work as editing a journal or book or press and/or teaching students to do that work, which is happening more and more within MLA fields, be it language, literature, or rhet/comp.

So, I propose a new group under Transdisciplinary Connections, where all these fields can play together in a theoretically informed praxis of editorial work, including work related to Textual Studies but also related to the work of producing original (print or digital) texts for consumption. This is publishing studies, so maybe it’s just called that, shortly, and not Editing and Publishing Studies, although I think more people might be interested in it (unless you revive the Textual Studies and Bibliography groups, which certainly are related but separate). I am also thinking of all the affiliated groups who would be interested in this grouping: CELJ, Assoc of Documentary Editing, CLMP, Assoc of Teachers of Technical Writing, etc.)

I’m really excited to see this level of conversation happening on this site. Kudos to Marianne Hirsch and Rosemary Feal — along with the other representatives of the MLA for making this happen. IMO, more than just the structure of the discussion groups (which is important to be sure), it’s refreshing to see the critical yet also generous discussion happening here. I’m happy to see the MLA take seriously some of the feelings of alienation my rhet/comp friends have been expressing for years.

Cheryl Ball, Lisa Vollendorf, and Rosemary talk about this a bit in the “Profession” section, but I’d like to see a category reserved for something like: “Academic Politics, Adjunct Labor, and #Atlac.” I feel that, as a discipline, we need to start thinking more seriously and systematically about these issues – especially given last year’s theme. Further, I think an entire section devoted to the Public Humanities (separate from the labor and politics section) would be useful for those of us looking to bridge academia with the rest of the world.

Roger, indeed. I woke up in a panic last night realizing that there was no alt-ac or other professionalization group, as you suggested. Just as folks have praised the inclusion of the Digital Humanities group as bringing MLA up with the times, it would be irresponsible to not have an alt-ac AND adjunct labor group. But, as Howard Tinberg said about the Community Colleges group, having separate groups also risks ghettozing these groups, which would be equally irresponsible given that the majority of laborers among us are contingent. I really like your proposed title, and will spin it a bit: Alternative and Contingent Professionals. This could also include things like Writing Program Administration, which has been brought up as a possible subsection of the rhet/comp group, as it would cover folks who run DH centers.

Thanks for all your work on these proposals and for responding thoughtfully to so many of the comments, which inevitably (mine included) address chiefly the reservations we have about corners of the proposals. It wasn’t clear to me from the draft proposal that you were proposing combining the two English Renaissance/early modern divisions and the eighteenth-century divisions. The force of “or” in the new group list wasn’t clear to me, and evidently not to some others who have written in. I share the feelings of hundreds of others concerning the latter combination, and I wonder if the paucity of comments about the first combination might partly stem from confusions like mine. The other aspect of the reorganization that is not displayed in the proposal is the fate of current divisions. Others have remarked on the disappearance of theory. Another unmarked disappearance is the European Literary Relations Division. While like Andrew Parker I applaud the impulse behind the new ocean-centered groups, they obscure the fact that Bohemia has never had a seacoast. Continental studies within individual periods can be accommodated in newly proposed or continuing groups, but cross-period European relations have no obvious place in the new organization, so far as I can see.

Thanks for this comment! Theory has not “disappeared”–if you look at the current list of divisions and discussion groups, you’ll see that “Theory” is not there as a separate category, though it’s there as “Language Theory.” Might it now be on the map as “Multilingual Theory”? Or (as it’s named in many university curricula) “Critical Theory”?

On another of your points: I don’t think that lack of protests from 17th century scholars is a function of confusion; I had the privilege of being at the executive committee meeting last January where we talked about the pros and cons of merging the 17th-Century English Literature division with the one currently named “Literature of the English Renaissance, Excluding Shakespeare.” Many of us regularly teach undergraduate and graduate courses that cross the century line–including Shakespeare courses. What isn’t yet clear to me from the Commons posts is whether there’s any consensus among members of both early modern/Renaissance divisions about the option to amalgamate. Doing so would give the newly constituted group 4 guaranteed sessions for each year until the first Program Committee Review, and a good basis (I would think) for evolving robustly thereafter. Colleagues in the “English Renaissance” division agree with the MLA proposal to drop “Excluding Shakespeare” from their title; but it would be helpful to hear from more members of both early modern/renaissance divisions about the pros and cons of a possible union within the framework of the MLA. Specialist conferences in these fields abound and provide opportunities for different kinds of sessions than those that might be staged for specialists and non-specialists both at the MLA convention.

As for some thoughts on “European Literary Relations”–that division’s proposed subsumption (along with the overlapping Discussion Group called “Romance Literary Relations”) into the new groups of “Mediterranean” and “Atlantic” has prompted questions from others on this site; we’d like to hear from more members who are concerned, as Angelika Bammer puts it above, with Europe’s apparent disappearance from the new map. It hasn’t of course disappeared; its still very much there in the shape of its nation states and national languages. Should it also be there as “European literary relations”? Could you/we think about a different name that would acknowledge the importance what Roberto Dainotto calls _Europe (in Theory)_ ? This is a historical as well as a phantasmatic phenomenon that now includes the EU (and many discursive and visual reflections thereon); newly inflected North/South tensions; a literature about multilingual migrant workers; and many other facets that might be worthy of MLA sessions in the future. We would be grateful for more comments from members concerned with how “Europe” should be represented in and by MLA groups.

It’s really heartening to see the MLA leadership tackling a difficult and thankless task like trying to make Association structures and categories reflect the critical, theoretical, and historical work that we actually do. The committee has made a start, and that’s huge. It’s the effort to get an organization to begin to change that requires courage, vision, and faith. The committee has demonstrated all three. They don’t claim to have “gotten it right,” but only to have begun the process. It’s up to the members to work through the details. But It’s important to recognize the context of the profession and status of the humanities in general to which this laudable effort responds. An association that does not reflect what it’s members actually do, but rather clings to fragmented categories from an earlier moment does a disservice to the profession. We can all benefit from rethinking the areas and descriptions that we work in. We do it when we devise new courses, so why not with the MLA divisions and categories. Anxiety of irrelevance or effacement is real, but the way to overcome it is to rethink and renew. Resistance to change is a missed opportunity to really show the resilience and excitement of one’s discipline. Let’s get behind the effort of Professors Hirsh, Ferguson and their committee and help make this a positive experience for the MLA.

From the FAQs: “The proposed new structure applies only to divisions and discussion groups. Although allied organizations sponsor sessions at the MLA convention, they are independent of the association and have their own governance structure”

I wonder whether it’s possible to have a ‘vote up’ option on some comments? In some cases, rather than adding more text, I’d like simply to signal support for another’s comment or suggestion.

First, I just want to say this is a brave and thoughtful effort to rethink a structure many have been unhappy with for a long time and to re-energize the MLA’s enormous conference. Overall there are many things to like about this–and some areas of concern, esp. as others have noted in cases where “or” suggests two options are being floated–one that retains 2 groupings, and 1 that combines them. Some combinations could be fruitful, encouraging more cross-talk, but on the other hand, these same combinations might also produce kinds of competition for space that might make cross-talk less likely or press for strained connections and complicated audiences. Some of the period designations seem particularly troubling here as others have noted (objections to the Long 18th-C is the one I know best). Despite requests to think beyond nos. of sessions, sessions are of course a major part of the MLA’s currency–so the topic won’t go away.

Many of the new groups in particular are suggestive, flexible, and/or much needed updates reflecting the changing fields within the MLA. I was interested by the various panels on these issues at the last MLA, and it’s good to see some of it coming together.

Metaphors like “map,” “tree,” and “body” have long been used in encyclopedic organizations of knowledge, and the MLA does see its task as that of beng an encyclopedia of the profession. Such schematising metaphors have never been wholly adequate to the task. The map may be a way of bringing into the foreground certain imperatives of the MLA, but it’s important to remember that the map is a metaphor. As such it distributes knowledge transversally in the present, where previously we thought of literature longitudinally as having a history. I wouldn’t want to see that history foreshortened so that each literature can be fitted into its space on the map of the present, without regard for how deep that history is. Maps have been criticised for flattening out what they represent., I would add that not everything on the proposd list actually does fit into the map of geogrphical regions. What we have is more like a palimpsest of different practices of organising knowledge, and I’d argue for accepting that, accepting the value of the historical model in that palimpsest, and not allowing the metaphor of the map to take root too literally.

Thanks for the interesting reflection on maps and metaphors, and for proposing the palimpsest as an alternate frame. Actually, as a great fan of historical atlases and their overlays, I see maps as both geographical and historical. In the process of revision, the working group not only paid critical attention to history and periodization, but also made sure that the very history of the field’s evolution would be visible in the new configuration we proposed.

Like David Shumway, Jane Gallop, and others I wondered where the theory went.

I wanted to like “Genre and Media Studies” as a rubric, but the more I stared at it the less I could make sense of the subcategories as constituting a coherent set of subjects for study. Do film and (related?) media belong with genre, genres? Or are film etc more nearly one of the Transdisciplinary Connections? (Not crazy about that rubric, but at least it indicates spaces between.)

Theory aside, it seems to me that the biggest omission is a category explicitly addressing editing and publishing. Not textual editing or bibliographic practice , but pragmatic work on developing projects, models of writing, faculty development, writing and the professional life course, etc. These subjects and topics may or may not be addressed from convention to convention, but instituting a group or category would underscore a commitment to professional development at all levels, including p/t fac and grad students. We should do this.

I want to echo the thanks to Marianne Hirsch, Margaret Ferguson, and the MLA in general for taking on this enormous task. Making the divisions more relevant to current areas of research and practice is no easy task, especially when any one committee cannot claim expertise in all fields. I am impressed with how this new format has worked, that is, I am impressed with the way in which the MLA has encouraged comments and responded to them, not as a way to ask for input only to dismiss it, but as a means for ameliorating the proposed changes. I don’t think I’ve ever seen so much active discussion by MLA members outside of the convention on the difficulty of demarcating disciplines, nor have I seen such concerted efforts to be sensitive to member’s concerns.

As many of you know, Professor Hirsch’s presidential theme for the year is that of “vulnerability.” It strikes me that many responses to these changes reflect the feeling of vulnerability within the profession. Many departments are reconsidering what fields are crucial in their future hires and, as the 18th c. scholar Sandra Macpherson just said to me, there is a feeling that if the MLA eclipses or does not explicitly acknowledge a field that formerly had its own space within the MLA, that departments may take that as a cue to eliminate fields.

The feeling of endangerment clearly fuels more conservative and reactive responses, and for understandable reasons; however, many of our groups, even those that remain unchanged, like Old English, would benefit from serious contemplation on how we characterize our field. Within the group of Old English, (as many have pointed out in earlier discussion not shown here), is hidden Anglo-Latin, as well as the relation to Old Norse, and Celtic. Even later “medievalisms” creep in. The recently published Cambridge History of Early Medieval English Literature (ed. Clare Lees) takes this diversity into account in remarkable ways making for a much more dynamic and responsible way of envisioning the field. While it does not look like our group’s name will be changed, I do hope that we can all follow the initiative here and to contemplate how to best represent the current state of fields to sustain our relevance in the future.

Much of this commons site seems to be doing this kind of work, but I encourage division representatives to continue the discussions.

On a different note, reading everyone’s comments, I would agree that “theory” is something that needs to be addressed in and of itself. I also thought that the comments posted by the rhetoric and composition person above were very interesting with regard to the imbalance between sessions and predominance of jobs. If we want to take seriously alternative career paths, this seems one way of addressing the issue.

I applaud the addition of many of these new groups, especially geographically organized ones such as Caribbean, Global South, Hemispheric American, and conceptually organized ones, including animal studies, ecocriticism, and medical humanities.

I concur with my colleague Patricia Dailey’s comments immediately above mine that it is difficult not to feel that in losing an MLA category one is somehow losing influence, security, visibility — in a word, turf. But it seems to me that consolidating (and therefore reducing) categories also has much to offer by way of connections, communication, cross-pollination. For that reason, I would suggest that those of us who work on literature in English written between 1800 and 1900 think about how well we are served by splitting that period into three separate categories.

Is it really helpful to have three separate groups? Romanticism is indeed often taught, studied and written about separately from the rest of nineteenth-century literature, and its position straddling two centuries is central to understanding what Romanticism was. For that very reason it might be useful to have MLA be a place where scholars who work on later periods of 19th-century British literature mingle with Romanticists, but at least here I understand the distinction in play.

I need more help understanding why it’s important to separate Victorian from late-19th and early-20th Century British — indeed, the uncertainty about how to define the latter category (is it British? is it Transatlantic?) suggests it may not really be a category at all.

Would it be so bad for English literature to follow the French categories in this regard and adopt one category for 19th-century English literature? Could we think of this not as losing turf but as gaining cohesiveness and the ability to make connections across bodies of knowledge that often remain isolated from one another?

There are so many comments above that I agree with that in addition to thanking Marianne Hirsch, Margaret Ferguson, Rosemary Feal and all the members of the committee, I also want to thank all those folks who have taken the time to read the proposals, think about them and comment on them. It’s really an impressive set of reflections that could be used productively in a literature or other class, it seems to me, to show how scholars think and debate.

In any case, I do think the committee has us as an organization moving in the right direction and that while no structure should suffice forever, this one could serve us well for a while.

I also want to chime in positively in support of a group on Literary and Cultural Theory.

The former division of Autobiography, Biography and Life Writing did itself agree to the shorter name of “Life Writing,” at the same time that we were a bit sad that that name does not make clear how many other genres, non-written, also contribute to telling life stories. If any one out there has a new idea, please do post it here or get in touch with us.

My thanks again. This is the most positive I’ve felt about the profession in a while.

I had this problem when coming up with a title for my book about autobiographical (or, as Lynda Barry puts it, “autobifictionalographical”) comics–I went with “life narrative” (Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics). “Life writing” has taken on such force as a term… but is “narrative” a possible substitute for “writing” here?

I also want to echo earlier comments in profusely thanking all of the members of the committee for this huge amount of work, and the incredible positive result of making its own process transparent and open to debate and discussion. Thank you! And, as with others, I want to re-iterate the need to give theory the chance to re-appear in stronger form in this configuration.

I cannot adequately express my gratitude to Marianne Hirsch, Margie Ferguson, and Rosemary Feal for the work they have done to initiate changes in the organization’s divisional structure. Responses to their suggestions have been numerous enough by now to constitute a genre in its own right. That genre’s most fixed feature is a short initial expression of thanks to the committee for their proposals, followed by a long list of reasons why they won’t work. So I repeat my own thanks to the three remarkable persons who have initiated the possibility of real change in MLA structure. And I want to add that I think most of what they propose will work—if we can overcome our own anxieties about breaking habits.
One reason for being optimistic is the large number of good suggestions that have already emerged in the voluminous responses on this site, from graduate students to chaired professors. The volume and intensity of the more than 400 interventions make clear that MLA is anxious to open up new ways to study, teach, and interact.
Its equally obvious, nevertheless, that the scale of difference by which we are now required to measure whatever parochial professional innovations we make is bigger than some of us are prepared to admit. We live in the midst of more than one revolution, the outcomes of which cannot be known. It is perhaps not too much to suggest that the time/space indicators that were used to organize categories in 1974 (the last reorganization) do not adequately capture the reality of the present—to say nothing of the future. When I stop to reflect on the changes that have taken place within my own field of Slavic Studies over the last forty years, I am humbled by the—mostly unexpected—differences between the world in which I published a PMLA article in 1967, and the world as it is now suggesting it might be. The ugly blue format of the journal then was as wrapped in a dream of local scholarship as I was: MLA was selling a guide to graduate students calledThe Aims and Methods of Scholarship in Modern Languages and Literatures. It comprised the whole work of the profession under four categories: Linguistics, Textual Criticism, Literary History, and Literary Criticism.
How many new categories have appeared since then? How many new flags have appeared in the UN Plaza, how many states have passed away, how much ‘disruptive’ scholarship has transformed what the professoriate now thinks is important? As we struggle to grasp the consequence of our increasingly mathematicized lives, we must be ready to accommodate changes in how we do our work that recognizes the world is changing at a degree of velocity unsuspected in the childhood—and professional careers—of some of our older members.
The only way to do so is to forego parochialism. I have been struck by the solidarity of scholars debating the suggestion of reorganizing under the rubric of “The Long 18th Century.” Eminent scholars (some of them friends) have made powerful arguments for maintaining the status quo. Such univocal argument may be a sign of how wisely Divisional Structure was apportioned in 1974. Or—it may be an index of just how difficult changing that structure will be, given the learning, eminence, and experience of those who support the status quo.
The problem of how to decide boundaries (even when they are defined by oceans) is that the locals will always know more of their region than anyone else, and thus always have an advantage provided by the very thing scholars value most: superior knowledge of the subject in dispute.

I have read the general comments above and add my gratitude to those involved in tackling this overhaul of our group structures. I remain concerned about the creation of so very many subcategories — we seem to be among conflicting arguments as humanists: (1) what we do as humanists matters and is generalizable to broader cultural trends and realities and (2) we are so highly specialized that we cannot speak across sub-disciplines without creating even smaller interest groups. I am wresting with the broader implications of this for our profession. I personally do not like the conflation of Lusophone and Hispanophone for some fields (into Iberian) but, on the other hand, I don’t understand why we need to have one group per every language area on the Iberian peninsula. So my own reactions map onto the critical issues at hand: to what extent should the MLA support hyper-specialization in an age in which we are hard pressed to be more articulate as public advocates for humanities, which requires us to speak across fields. At the end of the day, I fall on the side of more interdisciplinarity and less specificity as a way for us to position our professional organization as effectively as possible within the broader cultural context in which we find ourselves.

I concur — thank you to Marianne, Margaret, and Rosemary in particular for your hard work in this huge process. I support most of the changes, but I do have some objections and questions.

I object to the addition of “diaspora” to Asian American as well as Italian American and Jewish American divisions, as I explain in response to those paragraphs below. (I’m also unhappy that the name change to “Asian American and Asian Diaspora” is presented as having been approved by the Asian American Division’s Exec Comm, when it was NOT. I hope this was an unfortunate oversight that will be corrected.)

Also, it seems odd to me that Southern literature should be left out, given that this is such a large, vibrant and specific field. Furthermore, I do have to agree that Persian/Farsi lang. and literatures is another serious omission.

I’m genuinely unsure about the division of African literatures division. On the one hand, it seems that an entire continent can surely have as many divisions as one country (the U.S.). On the other hand, any temporal, geographic, or religious-cultural division is going to raise many questions/objections. Ultimately, the appropriate sub-sections will have to come from that division itself.

Finally, I heartily applaud the addition of interdisciplinary groups like Animal Studies, Ecocriticism, Indigenous Studies, Medical Humanities, etc. These are long overdue.

I begin my response to the whole page and the 90 comments above by quoting:
“More important, the present list, organized primarily by national literatures, by periods and traditional genres, embodies a restricted map of the literary and cultural field; it’s a product of the legacy of colonialism and empire that our colleagues have actively been displacing in their work.”
–Video message of Marianne Hirsch, President of MLA
I am writing to oppose the conceptual framework used to justify the “restructuring” you are planning. I begin by asking the committee to imagine what the discourse of the President of our Association, quoted above, sounds like to scholars who have devoted their life to understanding the literary and cultures of the past. The division panels where we present our work at future MLA Conventions are to be drastically downsized. In effect, we are being declared less ‘relevant’ than other more modern periods, or groups. This line of thinking is a deplorable example of what Bruno Latour has described as “the Modernization front”: the belief that since ‘history proceeds like a vector,’ all people must obey the imperative to fold the past into a future so that we can be more efficient, more productive, and thus… more modern. ‘We/you must in good conscience strive in all things to reflect what we (really) are (now), …and should be tomorrow.’ Ironically, Latour shows that this is the ideology that has been preached to subject peoples that were conquered by West nations.
There is a long history to this sort of modernist reforming zeal. Swift satirized it in the third book of Gulliver’s Travels. However, in 17th and 18th century the conflict of the “ancients” and “moderns” was highly generative, often against the apparent intentions of the combatants. Thus, avowed ‘ancients’ like Pope, Swift, Lennox and Fielding actually updated by translating classical genres (like epic and satire) into new media forms and formats; conversely, avowed ‘moderns’ like Addison, Defoe and Haywood incorporated earlier genres of writing into their modern productions.
Over the past 4 decades, our early divisions have not been redoubts of recidivist nationalism. (We don’t begin our panels with a hearty round of ‘Rule, Britannia!’) Instead we have embraced post-structuralist theory, post colonial study of the literature of encounter & the growth of empires, critical race studies, several generations of feminist critique, queer theory, ecological and cognative approaches. At the same time, we have developed the historical horizon that sustains a critically import resource: the alterity of the past. Our blend of historical archeology and contemporary issues allows us to make a distinctive contribution to the knowledge that MLA seeks to advance. For this reason, old nationalist terms like “British” have provoked critique in our panel discussion, not the nationalistic triumphalism that our President’s video statement tendentiously suggests.
I hope these remarks will help the committee to understand the intensity of opposition that can be found in the MLA Commons discussion forums below—especially in the discussions developed under the two divisions currently devoted to the study of 18th century English literature, which your committee has slated for draconian cuts. Nowhere in the discussion forums below will you find any who are opposed to increasing the geographical scope of our groups/divisions, or the representation of new areas of specialization. For example, none have spoken against the expansion of groups under America, Asian, or “Transdisciplinary Connections” like Animal Studies or Memory Studies. However, this expansion can be carried out without cutting the panels sponsored by the early divisions of English literature. We are dismayed that the Association that has supported our research since the days of its founding, and which recently wrote this respondent a congratulatory letter for 40 years of continuous membership (!), is now mobilizing a set of politically correct arguments (against colonialism and empire, against hierarchies and exclusions, in favor of realigning “representation”) to push our research to the margins of, or simply out of, the Association. Ironically, if the MLA proceeds to weaken its commitment to the past, it will make it more difficult to engage scholars of Asian, Africa and the Middle East who have their own strong commitment to the study of the literatures of the past. It will also weaken MLA’s public effort to defend the humanities.
Finally, if you detect a sense of betrayal in the comments you can read below, it emerges from our surprise. Where we assumed there was support for the historical study of the literary humanities, there are instead bureaucratic knives being sharpened to reform us with cutbacks.

As someone who has taught and published at both ends of the “Long 18th century,” I wanted to endorse William Beatty Warner’s opposition to the assumptions driving this “reorganization,” which was apparently designed to reduce the absolute number of divisions and sessions associated with the historical study of past literatures. This is a short-sighted move for our discipline and our organization, because as many others have argued, it neglects the important developments in the historically-based fields from the last 40 years, and because it puts the structure of the MLA at odds with the considerable numbers of people in English and other departments still working within those nation- and period-based fields, and who will feel singled out and disenfranchised by this kind of treatment by their supposed disciplinary organization. Treating the interests of past vs. contemporary literature as a zero-sum game is divisive and unnecessary, since people expect to find both taught in literature departments.

I have reviewed the draft of proposed changes and the preceding comments on the proposal as a whole. Such a reorganization is a daunting task and I fully recognize the real work and consultation with various groups that this draft represents. Yet I do have some queries about the overall architecture of the proposed changes. It might be valuable to discuss further the logic of the groups proposed and the possibility of overlaps within and between groups before proceeding with a full vote.

My comments below refer first to some apparent lacunae and then to overlaps which those in the affected areas might help member adjudicate.

A. Lacunae:

Literary Theory is surprisingly absent, as others have noted.

Whereas Medieval French does not include subdivisions for, for example, Occitan, Iberian does for Catalan, etc.

North African is notably absent from the African groups

Several colleagues who work in periods prior to the present have conveyed their concern about proposed changes that compress their areas. Given that work in earlier periods has been lively and responsive to literary theory and cultural changes across the profession, would it be valuable to consult further with those members?

B. Overlapping Categories:

Media Studies and Literature and the Other Arts: would the constituencies represented by these categories be well served by joining forces?

Why would those working South Asian Disapora and South Asia and New Media wish to have separate categories?

Three categories that seem to duplicate each others’ interests: Multilinguistic and Heritage Languages, Vernacular and Creole Languages and (in the Transdisciplines category) Indigeneous Languages and Culture .

Given that Atlantic is offered as a separate category, why would we also have a Transatlantic late 19th /early 20 centuries American Literature category?

Making a point while reading carefully MLA group structures which certainly I highly appreciate even in that rendering , nonetheless I state that my concern strongly centers on ‘Mediterranean’ group – ‘European Literary Relations (including translation)’ and ‘Romance Literary Relations’. To make this explicit, I would like to suggest ‘Balkan Literary Relations’ to narrow the focus much closer to Balkan Languages and Literatures and Cultures so as to spin the interest of scholars and researchers even to the Albanian literature ( Old Albanian Literature; Modern Albanian Literature; Socialist Realism Literature; Translated Albanian Literature affording a bridge to properly apprehend the literary identity of this literature.

Echoing some earlier comments by Jonathan Culler, David Shumway, Jane Gallop, and others about what appears to be a missing category of Literary and Cultural Theory, I wonder if a main category needs adding, such as “Theory and Practice” (as applied to studies of language and literature); or if such a subcategory needs to be added to “Transdisciplinary Connections,” as some already have suggested.

Like others before me, I thank all those involved in developing the new proposed MLA Group Structure for their hard work. This process of an open discussion appears to be yielding important results, and I appreciate having access to everyone’s comments in this MLA Commons platform.

I’m joining this lively and productive conversation very late, but I, too, want to congratulate and thank Marianne Hirsch, Margie Ferguson, Rosemary Feal and the entire committee for such an excellent initiative at bringing the division and discussion group structure into more organic alignment with our work as it is imagined and practiced today. This was a daunting task and the results so far are truly impressive and exciting. I do agree with the comments about the theory lacuna (and other suggestions for tweaks sound persuasive as well). One could of course argue that theory is everywhere and permeates much of what we do and even that the draft’s re-conceptualized structures themselves constitute strong evidence of theory’s impact. But the fact that theory as an object of study helped bring about those very changes in what we do and will continue to warrants its location somewhere on the map. Overall, though, this is a remarkable proposal.

Dear colleagues:
I deeply appreciate the MLA’s efforts to rethink the organization of its divisions and discussion groups.
First, let me say that I support the proposal to dissolve the distinction between “discussion groups” and “divisions” into a new category: “groups.” Symbolically, at least, this change will go some way toward eliminating the intellectual hierarchy that the current distinction implies. And as scholars of language, literature, and other media, we know that symbolic capital is important. Yet words just as surely mystify. Whether material distinctions also will disappear is less sure: I note that the MLA still intends to apportion resources unequally, giving some “groups” one guaranteed session and others two during the proposed transition period. To invoke Orwell, then, some groups will be more equal than others.

That said, I find the proposed “map” of networks—presently organized under the broad categories “Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies,” “Genre and Media Studies,” “Languages, Literatures, and Cultures,” “Language Studies,” “Teaching and the Profession,” and “Transdisciplinary Connections”—out of sync with the MLA’s interest in jettisoning tired intellectual frameworks and in promoting more dynamic, fluid, transversal modes of knowledge-making in research and pedagogy, activism and advocacy. The subdivisions proposed in the “Languages, Literatures, and Cultures” category strike me as not as forward-looking as they could be. Why atomize the world’s languages, literatures, cultures into ever more infinitesimal particles? Why array these in such a way that they appear unrelated? I for one would like to see the “Languages, Literatures, and Cultures” category revised along the transcontinental lines currently envisioned under “Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies,” and perhaps also along transhistorical lines that at once concede and resist current periodizations.
Is there any unit, after all, that is not inherently heterogeneous—for all its apparent self-sameness—and therefore also inherently comparative?
I will cite just two cases in point: “African” and “Arabic.” First, I strongly oppose the proposed subdivision of the current Division on African Literature into “Southern African” and “Sub-Saharan African.” I echo the sentiments of many of the colleagues who already have posted here. The proposed subdivision perpetuates a fundamentally Eurocentric notion, at least as old as Hegel, that Africa “proper” is “sub-Saharan Africa”; it also, as Ato Quayson has noted, reifies the egregious apartheid-era distinction between South Africa and a denigrated African “core.” We would do well to recall the words of the South African writer and ANC activist Mazisi Kunene, who declared (in the pioneering trilingual, Third Worldist journal Afro-Asian Writings, in 1967), “There is a political fallacy which seeks to divide Africa into two segments: Africa, South of the Sahara and Africa, North of the Sahara. […] Arabic literature of North Africa, Nigerian, and Ethiopian literatures are as much an African heritage as Japanese is part of an Asian literary heritage,” and the better-known words of Frantz Fanon, whose Les Damnés de la terre (1961) warned against the desire to divide Africa into an “Afrique noire” and an “Afrique blanche.” I would suggest, then, that the current category “African Literature” be left as is—perhaps amending the present focus on literature be amended to “African Orature, Literature, and Media”—and the number of sessions accorded to the group expanded. The current category holds far more intellectual integrity than the subdivisions proposed, and the capaciousness and productive ambiguity of “African” better serve local, regional, and transregional scholarship on the continent’s oratures, literatures, and media.
Second, while the proposed subdivision of the current Division on Arabic Literature and Culture into “Classical and Postclassical Arabic” and “Modern Arabic” is, on its face, less egregious than the proposed vivisection of Africa, here too the strategy—while well-intentioned and in fact supported by some of my colleagues in the field—unwittingly ends up dividing and conquering a relatively small (if strong) community of established and emerging scholars. Here too I would propose that the MLA retain the category “Arabic Literature and Culture”—perhaps amending the name to “Arabic Literatures, Cultures, and Media,” which might better reflect the plurality of “Arabics” and modes of Arab cultural production that flourish in the world—and expand the number of sessions accorded to the group. As other scholars have pointed out, some of the most exciting work in Arabic literary and cultural studies today challenges the modern (and deeply ideological) theses of “decline” and “renaissance” that often have sequestered the “classical” from the “postclassical,” the “premodern” or (denigrated) “medieval” from the “modern.” To my mind, at least, keeping Arabic “one” would be far better, intellectually and politically, than subdividing it by period or geography, given that so many of us in the field are working now—and many more of us will—to challenge and redefine hermetic periodizations and geographies.

A last-minute thank you to the committee for their work. The proposal provides an excellent road map for the years ahead. My two cents on the table:

1) I do not agree that “literary theory,” because it is already present under other rubrics, would not need a stand-alone category. It does. Mutatis mutandis: Mexican literature is already implied in Latin American literature, but the internal coherence of that scholarly endeavor justifies its existence. If this creates redundancy, all the better, as this is a way of conferring emphasis and rewarding specificity. Duplication has its own risks (diluting constituencies), but if it seems like the thing to do, then there might be enough interest to sustain multiple, partially overlapping categories in the foreseeable future.

2) In the spirit of “taking the long view” mentioned in the participation guidelines, a point of concern for the future is the limited scope of the Latin American sub-categories. As Delegate Assembly representative for the Division Executive Committee on 20th Century Latin American Literature, I participated in an e-mail exchange with several colleagues where this point was debated. (I mention it here, and not in the paragraphs devoted to the region, because I think the implications are global.) Some wanted more sub-regional categories, while others worried this would lead to very small groupings. For the future, then: it is obvious that, if the MLA group structure is to be, in some sense, encyclopedic, there is more than enough good scholarship and literature to justify, say, an Andean, Colombian, Central American, or Southern Cone group —in addition to the existing Latin American period groups. It becomes something of a chicken-and-egg problem: do such groups not gain traction because the category does not exist? Do they not exist because there is not enough going on there? It is also the case that other organizations, especially the Latin American Studies Association, have more convening power than the MLA for some of these research agendas. These notes could be extrapolated for other regions as well.

A general comment about the entire proposal: I think the flexibility it offers with “groups” in ever-changing fields of intellectual endeavor, plus the new continuity made possible by the three-year seminars, make this a plan worth trying.

Kudos to you, Marianne and Margie, for guiding this complex process so deftly and conscientiously. It is certainly time for the MLA to remap our sprawling intersection of fields, and our many concerns about our lives as lived in the academy – intellectually and professionally. And kudos too for inaugurating this set of online conversations about our disparate fields and the stakes of the organizing principles that drive our structures for mapping our activities. I have benefited from the conversations here from the many colleagues who have registered their responses, mounted their arguments, and engaged one another.

I’ve tried over time to get a new group devoted to punctuation started but the MLA has put large barricades in place to prevent any new idea from being added to the list of groups, it seems. First of all, it is difficult to locate a number of people in the organization
from around the world that would support a new group because there is no easy avenue for finding them. You need to make a way for people to participate, a system for getting people involved–post it in the newsletter and let members comment on it when someone makes a proposal. Or better, post it to the HOME page of the web site where people can see it immediately and comment on the idea and perhaps show their support.

If the organization is really intending to include linguistics, then it has to make space available in the groups for things that may be less dominant, things like punctuation, filled pauses, and others. Those of us who have an interest in the less popular topics get pushed aside all the time, it seems.

To counter any “hey nobody is really interested in that stuff” attitude out there, let me say that I have tried to get sessions for the conventions approved for about 13 or 14 years without success, despite a good number of people responding to the call for papers. I have had to divide the group a number of times. I get the impression that there is an undertone, a bias against some subjects that pervades the proposal approval process. Set a rulefor the the approval process that some seldom-included topics must be approved for each convention.

One more suggestion: Set up a category for a discussion group for “less discussed” topics and list some of them that can participate. Encourage those topics in other ways. Make a point of it, instead of making some topics always be treated as if they are the dregs.

As chair of the Program Committee, I can assure you that all proposals get a wide and fair reading and are never rejected on the basis of topic alone. I am glad to give specific feedback on any proposal before submission (or in preparation for resubmission).

Any MLA member can start a Group right here on MLA Commons. It’s easy to do, and then members can have a chance to join the conversation. We’ll be in touch with you about how to do this.

I know the history of why there is a category of classical and modern, but there could bed just as much a case for classical and other cultures: medieval, for instance, or Arabic or Moghul — as well as modern.

When the list is viewed as a whole, it’s clear that “Renaissance and Early Modern” does not include the 18th century (or part of it). But this would not be apparent if the “Renaissance and Early Modern” group was referred to alone. I’m not sure whether this might present problems.

Good point, Carla! The name should perhaps be “Renaissance/Early Modern,” since these are alternative names for an era that begins and ends at different times in different mostly European places. Though historians use “Early Modern” to include the 18th c., literary scholars and teachers mostly do not; though conceptions overlap in ways that might perplex a number of readers of this map in online and print versions.

I don’t think we need to be distracted by historiographic practices — you’re right, most of us don’t think of the 18C as the Early Modern. Our new armature combines the names of forms, periods, places, and dates. What if we mix it up a bit more? Perhaps an old-fashioned solution here: “Renaissance to 1800”?

I never saw a problem with the category “Renaissance and Baroque.” To me, Early Modern encompasses both. I write on Early Modern literature, and many of the texts I discuss are from the Baroque–and very Baroque in nature (structure, style, language…). If we have labels like “Classical,” “Romantic,” and “Medieval”, I don’t see why we shouldn’t keep “Baroque.”

Or, we can be consistent with other sections (Iberian, for example), and simply have “Early Modern”

Thanks for all your work, even where I have reservations. The draft proposal as you present is not always clear about what it is proposing and does not always identify the fate of current groups. On the first score, are you in fact proposing to combine 16th-century British with 17th-century British, or are you merely mentioning a combination as a possibility. What is the force of “or” here? Same question for the two 18th century groups. I am in agreement with the hundreds who have raised thoughtful objections to the latter combination, and I wonder if the lack of a similar response to the former results from unclarity in the presentation. On the second score, I agree with Andrew Parker that the oceanic groups seem a creative move forward. But Bohemia has never had a seacoast, and the former European Literary Relations division here sees to disappear without any other trace, leaving options within defined periods but no obvious options in the main program format for other comparative Continental work. The apparent disappearance of theory is a further example of changes that are not explicitly articulated in the proposal. What else is being eliminated?

Adopting oceans as a organizing concept rather than continents is interesting (rather like looking at negative rather than positive space), but I’m also worried that something might be lost. I write about countries that are inland–comparative continental work, as Marshall Brown states. For example, where would I place a paper about Prague and Paris? Or where do we talk about a writer who has moved from Hungary to France? I realize that there is a reaction against “Europe” due to a history of Eurocentrism, but I also think that this designation misses a lot of the comparative scholarly action on the continent. And what about the European Union, for instance, and how this affects cultural production?

This new category reflects a research trend that is very active in colonial history, but not enough in literary studies (including literary history). I hope it will encourage a renewed problematization of the relationships between Europe and the Americas, although I agree that this change in denomination has a lot more implications for those whose research interests don’t cross the ocean.

I’m going to agree strongly with Martha Kuhlman above, and also comment on behalf of the Slavic Division and Discussion Groups (now the “Russian” and “Slavic and East European” groups).

While I completely endorse the effort to re-imagine the MLA’s group structure, and appreciate the logic of using oceanic categories to reflect the direction of comparative literature and comparative studies, I think we still have a problem here. These groups follow the legacy of maritime European colonialism, but elide the impact of land-based empires on the continent (primarily Russian and Austrian, but also to some extent Ottoman). In other words, how do we compare anything with the landlocked countries of formerly Eastern Europe?

It has been frustrating in the past years to see a blank for Caribbean Studies in the MLA divisions list, as if this crucial perspective on literature and culture at large was just a fad gone after a couple of decades of glamour: welcome back! Let us keep it critically lively and challenging, multilingual and open to the Caribbean diasporas as well.

This is a great opportunity to continue our discussions across the Caribbean, taking into consideration its Diasporas and going beyond the divisions based on language and/or sub-regions. Nevertheless, we have to make sure that this group establishes an active dialogue with other related groups, for example, the Puerto Rican, Cuban and Cuban Diasporic, and Latina and Latino groups, among many others.

I heartily endorse the creation of a Caribbean group that can serve as a space for the discussion of literature, culture, and language from the broadly-defined Caribbean (English, Spanish, French, Kreyol, Dutch/Papiamentu, Portuguese, and others). This group will be a space of dialogue akin to that fostered by other professional associations such as the Caribbean Studies Association (CSA). The group can choose to have comparative panels or focus on specific topics, languages, islands, or regions (the Caribbean coast of Central and South America, for example). It also corresponds to longstanding and new publishing efforts (for example, the new series on Critical Caribbean Studies at Rutgers University Press, coedited by Yolanda Martinez-San Miguel, Nelson Maldonado-Torres, and Michelle Stephens). I see great potential for this group.

I wholeheartedly agree with my colleagues, especially Lawrence M. LaFontaine-Stokes — this new structure would foster work across languages, something that might foster growth in Hispaniola Studies, for example.

Agreed, and hoping that such categorization would encourage interdisciplinary studies; of course it’s the Modern Language Association, but more and more we see approaches to cultural studies that are not focused exclusively on language-based study, but that involve inseparable components of language, literature, orality, art, folk and popular culture, material culture, etc.

Agreed, and hoping that such categorization would encourage interdisciplinary studies; of course it’s the Modern Language Association, but more and more we see approaches to cultural studies that are not focused exclusively on language-based study, but that involve inseparable components of language, literature, art, folk and popular culture, material culture, etc.

Super excited about this addition. I endorse Larry LF-S ‘s comparative proposals and/ regional proposals ( The forgotten Caribbean coasts of Central and South America). I would hope that this group could eventually propose some Comparative panel with the Mediterranean and/ or Indian Ocean group.

That said, I am excited to have an arena at the MLA where we can discuss Critical Caribbean studies.

This is one of the most exciting innovations, as it is not only a geographic region but a mode of study and an articulation of relationship–there is no Global South on the world map per se, but an immanent Global South wherever relations of discrepancy, alterity, hierarchy and yes hegemony obtain, while at the same time the GS is a locus for response, reconfiguration, and creative agency. I’d be thrilled to be part of such a division, which would embrace work, authors, and questions as disparate and unpredictable as literary economies of scale, interstitial modernities, the GS commons, and literature and language from Faulkner to Darwish, Ngugi wa-Thiong’o to Tagore and Soueif.

This would be a great addition that would enable rich, historically-specific conversations, demonstrate the intersections and differences within the Global South, and, potentially, enable collaborative work among scholars across nations, genres and time periods.

A Hemispheric American group will be very useful for those interested in comparative work across the Americas, a very developed field in terms of US and Latin America and the Caribbean and for the US and Brazil. It can serve for multiple constituencies and fields, for example: indigenous studies, Afrodiasporic studies, migration studies, and performance studies. It can also foster other connections, such as with Canadian studies. Precedents include the work of organizations such as the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics. I support the creation of this group.

This is great news per se, especially with the creation of another long awaited category: Atlantic. Literary studies need both dialogues, in order to better understand the relationships between text production (and the institutions) in Europe and in the Americas during the colonial time(s), and the parallel emergence of different, yet similar American literatures starting with the 16th century travel accounts.

Again, I agree with the creation of this “Hemispheric American” group — as someone who works as a comparatist across the Americas, it has been frustrating to figure out which discussion group or division group in the past when I work in several at the same time.

Brilliant addition and the comments are especially pertinent on why this is so timely and urgent an addition to the Comparative Literature division, since Hemispheric American is coming to be the default position “even” for what used to emerge under the American Studies banner–that is, it represents the ineluctable comparative nature of US American studies too.

Since my work on the Portuguese shipwreck accounts in Southern Africa, and the carreira da india includes Atlantic Ocean, Portugal, South Africa and Macau/Sofala/Goa I wonder if a “Maritime Studies” would be a good spot for sea-based literature? Of course it might be a very small number of folks working in this. How about trade’based studies? Silk Road, carrierra da india, and so on? Most of the work in Atlantic and Indian ocean studies was involved in trade-based questions, that I have read, and often did not fit the confines of a “ocean.”

This is true. Our group wasn’t getting abstracts from those places, however. For the past 5 years we have gotten Italian, French, and Spanish. I think this effectively eliminates the Romance literary relations group.

The MLA Working Group co-chairs hope that members of your discussion group will see opportunities for a robust continued existence under the rubrics of two new groups, Atlantic and Mediterranean. In our view, losing access to guaranteed sessions is what happens when a group is “eliminated.” That is not what’s happening here, though I understand that I may not yet grasp what you mean by “effectively.” For the sake of clarification, though, let me say that the proposal is for your discussion group to join with the division of European Literary Relations and to use the convention sessions guaranteed for both the Mediterranean and the Atlantic group in the future. After a transition period during which Romance and European Literary Relations would retain their original number of sessions but would also, we hope, begin to work together to plan some joint sessions under both the Atlantic and Mediterranean rubrics, the new groups would each have a minimum of one guaranteed session; there could be two such sessions in the future if membership numbers support them.

If current members of your discussion group could communicate with members of the European Literary Relations division either via this site or via email, that would be very helpful for members of the Working Group as we revise this draft “map” in the light of members’ comments. Thanks to you and Charles Perrone for weighing in here. I hope you’ll do so again.

I certainly applaud the addition of Mediterranean. I’m looking, though, for the European Literary Relations division mentioned above. Can you direct me to that? And if it exists, should it not be in the Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies group rather than in a Literary Relations group? This is what I would favor. Most of the work being done in cross-cultural European these days is interdisciplinary as well as comparative.

Thanks to the Working Group for this huge “refresh” of the MLA divisions and groups!

Scholarship on the Restoration era in Britain is currently expanding (not retracting), and has developed particular vitality in the past decade or so. Recent years have seen a resurgence of interpretations of the period between the re-establishment of the monarchy in 1660 and the turn of the eighteenth century, and many of us have begun to theorize a variety of “long Restoration” cultures. Alison Conway’s *The Protestant Whore* (Toronto, 2012) for instance, demonstrates the persistence of specifically Restoration-era language and preoccupations through much of the eighteenth century. So does my own *Force or Fraud* (Oxford, 2011).

The growing, productive recognition of the importance of Restoration politics, culture, and literature to all that followed is one of the most significant developments in literary studies during recent years. It is disturbing and puzzling to see the MLA not only failing to recognize this emerging trend, but actually cutting back on the opportunities for scholarly exchange on this crucial moment in literary history. “Restoration” is a Division category that we need. It has worked well in combination with “Eighteenth Century,” allowing division officers to construct panels that keep both the distinctions and the continuities between “Restoration” and “Eighteenth Century” in view. Calling it all “Eighteenth Century” is inappropriate. Please retain the Division of Restoration and Eighteenth-Century British studies.

As someone who for several years now has been publishing on the Mediterranean (including in PMLA) and organizing multiple interdisciplinary collaborative projects in Mediterranean Studies, I applaud this inclusion of the Mediterranean (which was rejected by the MLA a few years ago). However, I have some concerns, including Margie Ferguson’s clarification that this group would “join with” the Division of European Literary Relations. For me, the raison d’être for a category like “Mediterranean” is to bring certain European literatures (western AND eastern) into conversation with North African and West Asian lits. This raises a chicken-egg question: since the MLA is not necessarily the default organization for specialists in those non-western European traditions, the implementation of “Mediterranean” risks being reduced to “representations of the Mediterranean” in the same old lits–inevitable, perhaps, but also a stage that risks alienating scholars of the very literary traditions we would like to attract.

I second Sharon Kinoshita’s concern that Mediterranean studies simply not just replace Eurocentric Mediterranean studies. I see this addition as well as the Caribbean addition as groups that would welcome interdisciplinary studies. These would be forums that would welcome projects such as the Ottoman exploration of Africa as well as that of European navigators on the Mediterranean, etc.

Brian, I can’t find any narrative descriptions of any of these categories; can you? Do you see any reference to southern literature at all? If so, where?

I wonder whether the “Regional” category under “CLCS” is even intended to include the literatures of the U.S. South or any of the other regional literatures of the United States. It seems to me that it more likely refers to global regions (which are comparative). If I am correct, then MLA has abandoned (or at least submerged to the point of invisibility) the study of American literary regionalisms. I guess people working in “southern” or “Midwestern” or “Western” literatures would simply have to propose panels under “Early American” or “19th Century American,” and so on (and would probably stand a very small chance of having their panels approved). I guess the “special session” option might still be open, but still . . . .

I want to underscore the point Barbara Ladd makes in her 9/12 posting lamenting the absence of any rationale for the proposed changes to the constitution of groups. Without an explanation of how categories were conceived and criteria arrived at, members must infer how the stipulated general principles of reorganization were applied to individual scholarly and professional formations, standing and new. It appears that “Southern Literature” gets included in CLCS because it does not satisfy the new criteria for inclusion in the “American” subdivision of LLC, which seems to be organized by traditional periodization and national ethnicity. Debatable as the reproduction of both those categories might be for a 21st century MLA, such an arrangement also seems to make the new category “Regional” something of an outlier in CLCS, which is organized according to non-national periodization and specific, recognizable geographic areas. “Regional” is neither here nor there. It functions in this grouping as an abstract concept, not a period or a locale, or even some interactive combination of them. Doubtless all the proposed new categories could be challenged along similar lines, and I’m sure no one means to be obstructionist to productive rethinking and reform, but it seems to me that the proposed reorganization treats Southern literature exceptionally in one noteworthy way: it does not take a field the way its practitioners themselves understand it. Other new and reorganized categories reflect emerging and continuing scholarly, professional, and teaching communities. But the reassignment of Southern literature to Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies does not reflect what many of us think we do: study US Southern literature as a kind of American literature. The field of Southern literary studies enjoys well-established institutional and professional standing; generates robust scholarship that deepens and complicates its object of study; has developed a self-conscious methodological and historical literature; and has engaged all the major recent developments in the study of American literature, including hemispheric and transatlantic turns. The call for a New Southern Studies appeared in the journal American Literature for good reason. Though it may not be a perfect fit, US Southern Literature belongs in the company of other bodies of “American” Languages, Literatures, and Cultures

Southern literature (i.e. the literature of the U.S. South) does not belong under CLCS. I don’t know what rationale is behind this proposed change, but it doesn’t really make a lot of sense. Southern literature belongs under LLC American, as would “Literatures of the American Southwest” or “Midwestern Literature” or “Literatures of the Northwest.” Inquiry into the regional dimensions of American writing is longstanding and ongoing. It is not comparative, nor is it necessarily “cultural studies.”

I agree wholeheartedly with Barbara. It makes no sense for this to be under CLCS. If the rationale here is to subsume all regional U.S. literatures into a single group–a rationale that would lead to no small amount of debate, I might add–then wouldn’t LLC American be a better home?

I also agree with Barbara–southern literature does not belong under the CLCS category. Instead, it should be placed under “LLC American.” I also question whether “Regional” as an overarching category is sufficient to adequately encompass the wide range of U.S. regional literatures.

Last comment. Promise. I quite like the idea of a group dedicated to the comparative study of regional literatures–I may even have floated the idea last spring–but I think there needs to be sufficient investment from other groups studying regional literatures. Do we have that here? Or would this group be simply the literature of U.S. South and other regions of the world to-be-named-later?

The idea was to form an expansive group to look at regionalism as a literary category and a category of literary study. Southern US literature offers a rich template for such a categorization but there are many other regions with similarly robust work and we invite others who take regional approaches to weigh in here about the promise of such a category.

If the “Regional” category appeared under American LLC, that would be a different argument. Right now it appears under CLCS, which implies a category meant to encompass regionalisms around the globe. This is certainly an interesting category (and I, for one, wouldn’t mind hearing a paper on Ellen Glasgow and one on Thomas Hardy in the same session), but the conceptualization does marginalize U.S. literary regionalisms as a vibrant focus of study within American literature and culture.

Some comments on this thread are coming from the perspective that “southern literature” is not primarily a regional category (Kreyling, Bibler). That is also a viable position–it is not a position I personally hold but I do recognize that there is a strong case to be made that “Southern” should remain a distinct subcategory within the American LLC grouping.

I totally subscribe to the new general comparative “Regional” category meant to diffuse the dominance of cultural centers in favor of a more flexible model of cultural exchange. The regional approach confirms the need to find in-between cultural spaces, meeting points with a multi-cultural and multiethnic history. This would be the right place for a “Balkan Cultural Relations” group for instance that would include some Eastern European countries and also Greece and Turkey. In my own work, the regional category would be extremely useful when considering a future history of the Francophone literature in South-Eastern Europe, by reuniting Romanian, Hungarian, Croatian, Serbian, Bulgarian, Greek and Turkish literatures and cultures.

I also agree that the proposed “Regional” group under the CLCS category does not make sense. I’m afraid that it would wind up meaning anything or nothing. Cole is on the mark with the question he raises in the postscript above: the proposal seems to create a reconfigured group posing as a group with a new name. There should be some kind of allowance under the “LLC American” category for the study of U.S. regional literatures. I don’t think it would be effective to have a group called “Regional” that actually focuses on the U.S. South. If there isn’t enough interest among members to sustain specific regional groups under “LLC American,” then a “Regional” group with a comparative framework allowing for approaches to U.S. regional literatures in national and transnational contexts could be a reasonable alternative.

My guess is that at some level, the (implicit) reconfiguration was influenced by this principle (listed in the FAQs): “the attempt to minimize hierarchies and exclusions among fields, large and small.” It does seem exclusionary to have a group focused on the U.S. South and no other U.S. regions. A “Regional” group in American LLC would respond to that problem, but it would introduce new ones.

Changing a group focused on the U. S. South to one focused on U.S. regions more broadly is, effectively, replacing the old group, right? With hopes that the new group will provide a home for the members of the old and that members suited to the new rubric will join? (I suspect that by placing this group, for the moment, under CLCS, MLA was attempting to respond to what some members of SLDG actually do–and I appreciate that effort. For reasons already delineated in these comments, though, that doesn’t solve the problem either.)

I don’t know what the best solution would be. Right now, I see only one other largely intra-national region on the list. (To be clear, I recognize that the U.S. South has transnational connections, but the old SLDG was still centered on a region of the U.S.) That exception is Galician, which I take to be motivated at least in part by another principle stated in the FAQs: “The protection of small fields, including the study of less commonly taught languages“–the highlighted phrase being a vital goal of MLA as a whole. A group devoted to the study of southern U.S. literature has no neat parallels on this list, and it does make sense that, given the goal of being non-hierarchical, some justification for that would need to be made. On the other hand, if the old SLDG is being substantially reconfigured–which is what appears to be happening–that should be discussed as such.

While I appreciate the MLA working group’s efforts to ensure that MLA divisions and discussion groups reflect the current state of the field, I join with others here in saying that I don’t fully understand how this new arrangement fits Southern literary studies into the broader tapestry of the MLA. In terms of our research, a few, but by no means all, of us have research agendas that could fit into the Regional and Global South comparativist groups. But this reconfiguration would both divide us in new ways and fail to provide a home for all of us. In terms of our teaching, this reorganization doesn’t seem to reflect the fact that Southern literature is still a viable subfield of the job market. For evidence of this, we can look to the English Literature pages of the Academic Jobs wiki, where “American/North American Literature” is divided into seven subfields, one of which is American South. Southern literature fits under LLC American, by my reckoning.

First of all, I regret that in this age of networking and hyperlinks the MLA has opted for a traditional, hierarchical system in which “Southern literature” can only reside within one category. To me, the field is interesting precisely because it defies such attempts at categorization.

That said, I ultimately agree with all the comments above suggesting that, within the limits of the proposed system, Southern literature fits best under LLC American. Over the past fifteen years, with the rise of “hemispheric American studies,” comparative approaches have offered perhaps the most high-profile take on Southern literature, but even there, the best work always offered a both/and approach: the South is both like the rest of Plantation America and like the rest of the U.S. While “Americanists” from the Puritan origins school through the New Americanists have favored southern exceptionalism (as have traditional southernists, for very different reasons), more recent books like Leigh Anne Duck’s The Nation’s Region, Jennifer Greeson’s Our South, and the Lassiter/Crespino collection The Myth of Southern Exceptionalism all hammer home the Americanness of the region. This might seem to be an argument for eliminating the study of Southern literature as a separate field altogether, and we may someday get there (I for one hope we do, as I hope American studies comes fully to acknowledge what it presently still tends to disavow), but we are simply not there yet. I hope we might revisit this issue in ten or fifteen years rather than waiting another forty!

The Southern Literature Discussion Group has been renamed, by the MLA, “Regional” and classified CLCS – “Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies.” “Regional” appears in blue type, signifying “Group with new name proposed.” But it is clear that replacing “Southern Literature Discussion Group” with “Regional” is not a simple name change. “Southern Literature” possesses a certain precision, a history within the academic profession and the MLA itself, and a certain professional identity for those who work in it. “Regional” doesn’t cut it. It’s not a question, either, of part and whole, whether southern encompasses regional or the other way around. Although I will argue that southern was regional before regional was cool, when it meant “local color.” We have moved a long way from arguing that, if the world only knew the facts, Mary Noailles Murphree would be as highly esteemed as Brett Harte or Sarah Orne Jewett.

In the group with us the MLA has placed some old standbys (groups with no change of name, name changes agreed to –which implies that they had been consulted. I was president of SSSL 20111-2013, and I don’t recall a query from the MLA reorganizing committee.) In any case, here we are in the CLCS group with Medieval, Renaissance and Early Modern, 18th-Century, Romantic and 19-Century, 20th- and 21st Century. These are categories reminiscent of the table of contents of the Norton Anthology of English Literature, redolent of an older MLA when periodization was part of the consensus. Southernists do work from the 18th-century onward, but I’m not sure we go as far back as Renaissance and Early Modern. The point, however, is not so much historical reach as logical compatibility. What does Regional have to do with the aforementioned historical periods? New groups in CLCS are Caribbean, Global South, Hemispheric American, Indian Ocean, Pacific. Atlantic and Mediterranean are in the CLCS group as “related.” These are groups defined by place, even if (sometimes especially if) those places have been scattered in diaspora. Representatives of those groups may make their own responses to the re-grouping, but I think southernists should request a change of classification and a restoration of our name.

What is interesting here, among several things, is that southern studies has sought to re-frame itself by taking on Caribbean, Global South, and Hemispheric American subject matters. Look at Smith and Cohn’s Look Away! Judging by the MLA reorganization, it looks as if those groups have preferred to remain autonomous, or perhaps fold southernists into their projects.

Barbara Ladd’s work has ranged over these “distinct” areas and she asks some crucial questions about the “Regional” marker: will it cut southern studies off from these colleagues and issues, and them from us? Behind Barbara’s questions I think I hear a larger one – probably a perennial one. Is southern a region or an identity? One thing it surely isn’t is a historical period. If it’s an identity, then maybe we should agitate for full-status membership in LLS (Languages, Literatures, and Cultures) along with the several American groups, with whom we have durable alliances and on whose grounds we sometimes poach. Southern bears a limited resemblance to Italian American and Italian Diasporic and Jewish American and Jewish Diasporic. Southern has a literature and a culture, and some would argue a language. I would not claim southern has a language as the Italians have, or as Jewish literature has Hebrew and Yiddish, but still I think we belong here –perhaps renamed (with consent) Southern American Literatures and Cultures. The plural seems deserved, and would also recognize our alliances with Native American (LLC), African American and African Diasporic (LLC), and in fact almost all of the groups in the American subgroup of LLC.

The classification as Regional recognizes only one facet of the kind of work we do, a strong and long-lived thread in our fabic to be sure. But we have stronger alliances with the groups in American LLC and that’s where Southern American Literatures and Cultures should be housed, in black to signify its new name.

Other posters have already explained why moving this group to the CLCS category is a strange and confusing proposal (what are “regional” comparative literatures anyway?).

I want to emphasize again that this reconfiguration of the southern literature group into a new general category of regional literatures will make southern literary studies institutionally invisible within the MLA. That is unacceptable. It is also an especially odd choice given that opera is being recognized as an area of study, while a flourishing field like southern literary studies is being swept under the rug. “Strange,” “confusing,” “odd”: this reconfigured group has not been planned out very well.

I would very much welcome the proposal to revise the American rubric to include regional groups, but I would not like to see all regional literatures grouped under a non-specific “Regional” label. The Southern Literature label needs to be retained/restored under “LLC American.”

Southern Literary Studies has remained a strong and vibrant group despite the institutional pressures mounted against it in English departments around the USA. Panels devoted to southern literature at MLA, SCMLA, SAMLA, and elsewhere draw good-sized audiences, and the biennial conference for SSSL has grown significantly since I first started attending in the mid-1990s. These panels and conferences also draw large numbers of graduate students interested in writing about southern literature and culture, both from North America and from Britain (where I taught for 7 years) and Europe, where there is widespread interest in the literature, history, and culture of the U.S. South.

However, these same graduate students also face added challenges on the job market because of their interest in southern literature. In the last few years, almost every single job ad asking for a specialty or sub-specialty in southern literature has come from a university located in the South. On one level, this makes a certain amount of sense; but it is also symptomatic of the fact that, as many have noted above, southern literature continues to remain “invisible” to the larger study of U.S. American literature. It would seem that most non-southern English departments are not interested in thinking about how southern literature might form an important part of the American canon, if they even see southern literature at all. And a consequence of this invisibility is that many graduate students and recent PhD’s have had to go on the market ready to perjure themselves and swear that southern literature is only something like a hobby–that even though they may have written about southern literature in their dissertations, they are fully trained in the broader canon of American literature and won’t just be teaching I’ll Take My Stand in every class.

Four years ago, after the publication of my book on queer sexualities in southern plantation literature, I found myself being asked at an MLA interview how I would convince the rest of the department and the dean that southern literature wasn’t just racist, white, Confederate men. I didn’t get a campus visit. I also know that many English departments, including ones with strong historical roots in southern literary studies, such as the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, actively discourage their graduate students (indeed, practically forbid them) from writing their whole dissertations on southern literature. This is clearly in the students’ interest, but I also think: why aren’t you also trying to convince your peer institutions that writing about southern literature is actually crucial to a better understanding of national [and global] literatures and cultures?

These examples give a tiny glimpse of the institutional difficulties self-avowed southernists still face. And while we remain a vibrant and relatively cohesive group with successful conferences, high-calibre research, and an ever-growing body of new scholars, we are often still invisible to others. Eliminating Southern Literature from LLC American would only make us more invisible and exacerbate the preconception that southern literature is all racist, white, Confederate men; that southern literature doesn’t really contribute to American literature; and that the South isn’t even a part of the nation that is worth reading about. There is no way that the proposed restructuring would “minimize hierarchies and exclusions among fields, large and small.” In the case of southern literature, it would make those hierarchies and exclusions even worse.

I forgot to add that many of these young scholars may also find themselves having to weigh their interests in southern literature against the expectations for tenure in their departments and universities. Not cool.

I agree with Lisa, Barbara, Coleman, Michael, and my other Southern studies colleagues above. I couldn’t agree more with what Amy notes above: “I want to emphasize again that this reconfiguration of the southern literature group into a new general category of regional literatures will make southern literary studies institutionally invisible within the MLA.”

Southern literary studies has evolved tremendously, particularly in the last decade or so. Subsuming it under the more general CL&CS rubric would effectively mute a lot of the fine, innovative, and interdisciplinary work my colleagues above and elsewhere have done.

Roland, yes please do propose revising the American rubric to include regional groups.

This may be kind of late in the game, but ahead of the November 20 deadline for input I want to add my voice to those of the many who have expressed concern about the baffling realignment being proposed here under the auspices of a simple renaming.
It may well be that the merits and demerits of creating a new group devoted to the comparative study of regionalisms—or the study of texts, writers, or movements from “regions” that cannot adequately be brought together under the new (and exciting!) geographic categories proposed here—are worth discussing. But it’s one thing to invite debate about “the promise of such a category,” as Marianne Hirsch does above, and quite another thing to frame the category as simply carrying on the business of an existing group (the Southern Literature Discussion Group) under a new name. That would be a serious misrepresentation both of what SLDG currently is and does and of what a Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies group devoted to the “Regional” would be and do.
So let’s recognize that (1) the desirability of a “Regional” CLCS group and (2) the future of SLDG are separate issues rather than merging them in the mystifying and seemingly disingenuous way they are merged here.
1. The proposed CLCS “Regional” group should be presented (by the Program Committee) and discussed (by the members) as what it actually is: a new group, with no “original.” It should be shaded orange and not blue on the Draft Proposal.
2. The future of SLDG is certainly worth discussing, but separately. And I agree with the many colleagues who have posted here that the best place for such as discussion is not under the thematic category of CLCS but under LLC (American). (The very fact that we are all having to post our comments in the CLCS section is further evidence that the whole conversation is misplaced and that the relocation of what was “originally” a Discussion Group devoted to a regional U.S. literature under the Comparative Studies category is misguided.)
Perhaps a single group could promote scholarship on “Regional” languages, literature, and cultures in the U.S. Perhaps, indeed, the SLDG could be “reconfigured” into such a group (upon approval of its executive committee). Or perhaps SLDG should retain its regional specificity (as “Southern,” a “Group with No Change” coded black) and be complemented by new groups (Midwestern? Western? Great Lakes?) to reflect the continuing institutional currency of regional categories in professional associations, literary societies, professional journals, university press series, academic research institutes, and the job market. Certainly the Working Group recognizes a similar kind of currency at work in U.S. ethnic writing, as evidenced by the diverse range of ethnic literatures to which it (commendably) assigns groups in the LLC (American) section of the Draft Proposal.
I have my own opinion about this matter, but my intent isn’t to settle it here. Rather, the point is that the proper place for this whole conversation is under LLC, not CLCS. I join the many here who encourage the Working Group to revisit this issue and expand the LLC (American) rubric to reflect the institutional currency of regional studies scholarship.

Thank you for this response. I amm speaking particularly for Patsy Yaeger, a member of the working group, who asks for your your comments on Judson Watson’s suggestions for reconfiguring the SLDG in ways that might make it more inclusive as a category and invites dialogue with others. We can certainly move this discussion to LLC on the next round of revisions.

I like Jay’s suggestions very much, but I want to register that he doesn’t so much suggest refiguring SLDG as part of a more inclusive group as discussing that as one option, the other being the retention of the SLDG. I do think a discussion is warranted. And, by “discussion,” I am suggesting a conversation with scholars in southern as well as those in other regional groups.

Jay’s response is right on. I think a wider discussion of what a “Regional” or “U.S. Regional” category would be very productive and invigorating, as long as that category is included in the category LLC (American). Neither “Regional” nor the original “Southern Literature” belongs in the CLCS category. But I would hate for SLDG simply to become “Regional” without that wider discussion taking place.

This strikes me as a welcome and indeed overdue change overall, but I’m not exactly certain where to locate the field of editing–including both theoretical and practical concerns–within this new map. It would seem to lie somewhere between “Book History and Print Culture” and “Library and Archival Studies,” while also of course overlapping with “Digital Humanities.” I would suggest revising at least one of those category titles to include a phrase like “textual scholarship,” or perhaps simply to add “Editorial” to “Library and Archive Studies.”

I agree that Editing is missing, but I don’t think we can assume that editing means the same for all MLA constituents, defined as “textual scholarship”. Editing is a huge part of my research and has nothing to do with textual scholarship as it has been defined by a majority of MLA members. Perhaps, instead, editing needs to go under Teaching and the Profession? (It doesn’t match the teaching part — well, it does the way I understand editing as an editorial pedagogy, but I’m guessing that’s not the way most MLA members would describe it.) I’ll reframe this suggestion under The Profession category.

The Bibliography and Textual Studies committee is grateful to the MLA for the work it has done on this proposed revision to the group structure. Quoted below is part of the text of an email I sent on behalf of the BTS committee in April in response to an MLA query about this possible name change. I will post it both here and as a comment to the related paragraph 34:

“In general, our group thinks, in one member’s words, that ‘we’d be limiting, rather than opening up, our range by aligning with one of the other subfields’ listed. Another says that ‘although my library colleagues are usually wonderfully supportive of bibliography and textual studies, it’s in many ways very different from what they do.’ This is my sense as well.

“With specific reference to the proposed mergers, one of us reports that she has ‘been to one of the meetings of the libraries and research group, and I think that they wouldn’t be a good fit. As I understand it, their focus is largely on the future of libraries and the way that impacts research–questions that we’re interested in as well, but in a different way.’

“With respect to the broader question of merging towards division status, I think it’s important that bibliography and textual studies are concerned with methodological questions that bridge all areas of literary study. The proposed division titles move away, for example, from the recent turn to the digital humanities that’s characterized many of our panels (such as the 2013 one, for example, or the ones created by Matt Kirschenbaum a few years ago). It seems like the direction we’d want to move if we were combined into a division would be towards methods of literary history more broadly, rather than implicitly limiting us as the suggested names do to a material form.”

—

For my own part, I second the observations by others in the comments here that the proposed revisions seem to deprecate manuscript studies, at a moment when the critical energy around the history of non-print, non-book forms is no less exciting and potentially transformative than that which engages the digital.

Paleography, codicology, and textual editing (especially from manuscript) are underrepresented here. Perhaps “Library and Archive Studies” is intended to take us to manuscript studies, but I don’t think it does. It looks more to media studies.

I agree with Carla. There is an under-representation of those fields. And with the growth of Digial Humanities these “ologies” are become crucial as we move from physical object to digital representations.

Library and Archive Studies. First, it should be Archival Studies. It’s also not clear if the constituency of the group is those who study libraries and archives in some critical manner, or librarians and archivists who are also MLA members. Probably it’s both, but this has the appearance of a catch-all category.

My druthers?

I think the need for a Digital Humanities group is clear.

I would favor a distinct group called Textual Scholarship and History of the Book for the reasons outlined by others above. This restores “textual scholarship,” broadly conceived–see, for example, the new Cambridge Companion to Textual Scholarship–to its named status, and while I acknowledge the differences with the book history community, I myself could live with them sharing organizational space in a single group. I think it would be generative.

I would also favor a distinct group called Library, Information, and Archival Studies (many library schools have rebranded as Information Schools or “iSchools”). This group would also stand the greatest potential for engaging professionals from those fields.

I would like to add my voice in support of Matthew Kirschenbaum’s comments. Boundaries are always difficult because there are edge cases, but I do find that the currently proposed title appears to push digital textual scholarship and the digital study of books right over the edge into the much more vaguely conceived area of Digital Humanities. Many of us in the area of digital studies and digital applications will be better served by encouraging us to include our work in more traditional areas. This will allow us more effectively to use digital technologies as tools enriching existing disciplines rather than seemingly creating a new area.

My focus, and that of many of my colleagues, is on textual studies in the digital medium; my major interest is in traditional approaches to the text and their further development in the culture of the “book” as conceived in the new medium. I would prefer to share my interests with scholars exploring the history of the book and textuality rather than those interested in computing per se.

As a textual editor with training as a bibliographer whose work in both fields crosses into the digital humanities, I would like to express my support for both Matthew Kirschenbaum and Michael Best’s comments. In my experience, discussions of digital tools/methods that are divorced from the constituencies that they serve are frequently underused or theoretically flawed — my work as a digital textual editor is far more related to my work as a textual editor than it is to digital humanities more broadly, as the bulk of the questions I engage with concern the act of transmission rather than a stress on any one media. A refusal to privilege a particular type of media is one of the reasons why book historians are turning away from the term “print culture” as a synonym of their field, as such a term ignores (as others have pointed out) electronic, oral, and manuscript publications.

While it is true, as Matthew Kirschenbaum suggests, that a library is neither a genre nor a medium, librarians and archivists are generally concerned with the ways in which knowledge is shaped by the technologies used to produce and distribute it. Their concern with the function and fate of the historical record demands an engagement with the materiality of the archive and so does align them with digital humanities and media studies.

I would never suggest otherwise, Marlene, and I indeed I would hope and expect there’d be all kinds of overlap in terms of the actual constituencies these various groups would serve. My main point is that much depends on what is meant or desired by establishing a “library and archives” group: certainly the critical engagement of the role those institutions play in the technologies and transmission of knowledge as you say; but if it is to engage with colleagues in those fields via outreach and invitation then I’d want to ask if the group isn’t better situated below under Transdisciplinary Connections, where there are linkages to similar professional communities of practice, such as law and medicine.

I agree with Matt that it would make sense to include something called Library, Archival and Information Studies under Transdisciplinary Connections. That would be an acknowledgement of shared practical and theoretical concerns. These include an investment in shaping transformations in scholarly research, communication, and publication as well as addressing the impact of the digital environment on processes of cultural transmission.

I agree with the consensus that it would be a mistake to leave behind the terms “textual studies” and “bibliography,” especially in a context like the MLA where there’s such a strong tradition of these forms of scholarship. By coincidence I teach in a program called “Book History and Print Culture” at U Toronto, and although I’m very proud of the work that happens under that banner, I’ll admit to wincing every time I read the “Print Culture” in the name. Partly that’s because “Print Culture” doesn’t do justice to those working in manuscript studies (ancient, medieval, and modern), or to those who study born-digital forms of textuality like e-books, or to those who find other ways into the field that aren’t defined by printing and its effects. Someday I’ll sneak onto campus late at night and change all the signs and letterhead to read “Book History and Textual Studies” or something along those lines.

On the category question I’d suggest taking a cue from people like Greg and McKenzie, who both emphasized that bibliography is defined not by its materials, but by its methods and mindset — which is why it can’t be limited to one medium, and why it has a future. The new Cambridge Companion to Textual Scholarship embodies that principle nicely, and I expect that David Greetham’s new edition of Textual Scholarship: An Introduction will as well. It’s an idea also strongly in evidence in the programs of the Society for Textual Scholarship conferences for at least the past decade, and probably longer.

Seems to me the right schema is the three-part one that Matt Kirschenbaum proposes above, which includes a section called “Textual Scholarship and History of the Book” — on the understanding that “Textual Scholarship” includes bibliography and editing, as well as the study of textual things that aren’t books. These are leaky categories, but none of the three Matt names is reducible to any of the others, which is a good thing.

On the list of things “Textual Scholarship” implicitly includes, I should also have mentioned codicology, paleography, diplomatics, and probably some other things — even critical software studies, depending on how it’s done. Those activities will be present in other disciplines like history and archives, but I’d consider them all forms of textual scholarship broadly speaking.

I’m enjoying all the thoughtful discussion on this topic. It does seem that “Textual Scholarship” could be a useful rubric–as someone who works with manuscripts, I think I would recognize myself as included–though I do worry a bit that its very capaciousness would not catch the eye as well as a more specific list–Manuscript, Print, and Digital Texts, for instance. But every title has its problems.

Does “Textual Scholarship” cover periodical studies and other genre-based scholarship of print and codex traditions? (She asks, n00bly.) If so, then I guess it could work. As a relative outsider to this field, these are some of the sessions I enjoy going to most at MLA, to see the crossovers happening with my work in digital media.

I come late to this discussion, and I don’t understand just what is at stake in the proposed change or what it is intended to fix, but I hate to lose the traditional term “bibliography” to indicate one of the concerns of the MLA and its members. Bibliography, as described by Don McKenzie in his inaugural Panizzi lecture, is the only discipline which has consistently studied the composition, formal design, and transmission of texts by writers, printers, and publishers; their distribution through different communities by wholesalers, retailers, and teachers; their collection and classification by librarians; their meaning for, and – I must add – their creative regeneration by, readers. However we define it, no part of the series of human and institutional interactions is alien to bibliography as we have, traditionally, practised it.” This seems to me to cover the territory, specific and yet inclusive.
Bibliography, broadly conceived, has been a central part of the MLA mission since its foundation 130 years ago and, with McKenzie, I think “Our own word, ‘Bibliography’, will do.” Perhaps something like “Bibliography, Scholarly Editing, and Textual Scholarship” would be a better name for the group if “Bibliography and Textual Studies” no longer appeals.

Indeed, the term “Book History” has always been incorporated within the term “Bibliography”, specifically historical bibliography. In Fredson Bowers’s “Bibliography, Pure Bibliography, and Literary Studies” (1952), he says that historical bibliography includes:

“enquiries into the evolution of printing (including type-founding and paper-making), binding, book ownership, and book-selling [. . .] all biographical and historical studies of printers, papermakers, binders, type-founders, engravers, publishers, booksellers, and anyone else in any way concerned with the materials and the production of the book and its subsequent dissemination [. . .] studies of costs and prices, methods of sale and distribution; studies of the meaning of imprints, colophons, copyright entries, and of advertisements; all aesthetic studies of printing and its materials as an art; all studies of sizes of editions from the collateral evidence of publishers’ records or other external material; all investigation into the circumstances of literary composition which have any relation to the physical form of the literary work, the transmission of literary documents, and the relation of authors to the commercial process of publication.”

Just wanting to add a late voice of support to Matt K’s suggested rubrics and to the principles he and Alan lay out of overlap and inclusiveness in the categories. Looking back to the imagined implementation, the proposal clearly envisions MLA members participating in overlapping groups and views that possibility of overlap (as I do) as a net gain.

Thanks to the Committee for its considerable work revising. My concern is that neither Book History and Print Culture nor Library and Archive Studies nor Print, Digital, and Information Culture include the task of editing in which a great number of members of MLA are actively engaged. I would ask for a place for us in the discussion groups.

While I am in favor of an MLA discussion group rearrangement, I am concerned about the erasure of lexicography from this rubric of study. “Book History and Print Culture” unsuitably assumes what is actively questioned by working lexicographers and scholars of lexicography: that “the dictionary” is a book; that dictionaries are soon to be history. (I do not in any way mean to disparage books or history.) Lexicography is a praxis–for dictionary makers and users alike–and its classification as a product preempts the analysis and innovation that currently animates the field. Last year’s panel featured discussion of recording audio pronunciation and look-up tracking tools in online dictionaries; neither seem possible in the frame of “Book History and Print Culture.” I suppose I was expecting an umbrella category more along the lines of “Language Description, Management, and Reference,” though even that doesn’t necessarily embrace the kinds of cross-disciplinary engagements–from literary to linguistic, cultural to rhetorical–that have been possible under the heading of “Lexicography.”

Belatedly, I would also like to express my dismay about the way that the name Book History and Print Culture omits or marginalizes manuscript culture and editing. As vital components of many MLA fields, these two activities surely deserve an identifiable place within the MLA groups. Furthermore, neither manuscript studies nor editing is immediately recognizable as part of Library and Archive Studies. I support Matthew Kirschenbaum’s suggestion to rename this group Textual Scholarship and History of the Book, which is a much more inclusive way of framing this field.

While I agree that DH is certainly one method of literary research, it doesn’t seem as if it should subsume them all. In the group previously known as the “Libraries and Research… Group” it was thought that methods of literary research would be included as they pertained to libraries, something that seems to be excluded by both of the proposed names (Libraries and Archive Studies or Print, Digital, and Information Culture).

I also wonder where in this structure interdisciplinary approaches to research that are not DH fall? What about text and image? Material culture? Music and text? Neuroscience approaches? All of these are methods that do not fall under the DH umbrella.

Myself, I don’t really feel that MLA needs a Digital Humanities category. It’s purposefully interdisciplinary and spreads across any of the other categories. And in 10 or 15 years, it will feel woefully out of date. Like “new media” does now. That being said, there needs to be some group to replace the Computer Studies group, and I can see why the leadership chose to include the 3 groups and discussion forums that it did to create this larger DH group. So I am not opposed to it staying. (And the name is certainly better than Computer Studies, which is very 1989.)

But I also agree with Sarah, above, that the Research Methods group shouldn’t be subsumed under the DH group. Research Methods should be its own group (not in literary studies, because that’s too specific. LOTS of fields at MLA have research methods that could be represented by such a group, including DH, Rhet/Comp, Literary, Library, Languages, pedagogy, etc.). Perhaps under Transdisciplinary Connections? That’s probably also where DH belongs, not under Genre and Media Studies (even though I can see why they placed it there, as the focus is usually on some media-influenced stuff, but it doens’t HAVE to be, such as data mining and text mining, etc., which is based on written corpora.)

I agree that DH should be under “Transdisciplinary Connections.” It does deserve its own category (considering the amount of scholars who have been part of the field since it was Humanities Computing [since the 40s-50s] coupled with those who joined in the last 5 or so years). It may or may not feel out of date in 10-15 years, but considering the rate at which English is itself changing, I’m hoping that these categories will be allowed to evolve more frequently than they did in the past. If, as scholars like Ted Underwood have argued, DH dissolves into several different scholarly fields, then the MLA can make changes then.

Many DH scholars make the distinction at precisely where Cheryl does: i.e. Media Studies usually focuses on the textual analysis of media objects whereas DH is more often about newer methodologies for traditionally literary sources. This isn’t always the case: lots of Media Studies people also do DH and vice versa, but it seems like the most simple way to make the distinction.

Putting DH in Transdisciplinary Connections would also emphasize that DH isn’t simply another theory for literary studies (a big misconception among many of my colleagues) but is in fact also practiced in History, Anthropology, Geography, etc.

I agree both that DH should be in Transdisciplinary Connections and that method is a useful way of articulating its difference from Media Studies. I also agree that Research Methods shouldn’t be reduced to “digital” methods, and that especially given how in addition to all our traditional methods we are borrowing methods from the interpretative and quantitative social sciences it is worth keeping that topic distinct. There is a whole other side to DH which is about new forms of expression of research too. Who “owns” conversations around new forms of scholarly publishing here? Is that also DH?

I think the Working Group has made a good choice here. The digital world is a medium. It is developing rapidly and is much more than a research tool, and it is concerned with much more than data, preservation, and access. It’s an environment with an evolving theory of its own. Genre may not be the most fitting term for the new textual objects that are being created digitally, but it will do for now. In contrast with Cheryl Ball, above, I think “new media” is also a good term. It points to the emerging forms and acknowledges that we don’t yet know what will come next. If I were choosing the name for this group, I would call it Digital Media.

Digital tools and digital media are now deeply embedded in scholarship of all kinds in the Humanities. I think that it’s important to recognize that there will be scholars looking at this phenomenon in a general way, while there will be many (possibly many more) using digital approaches, and digital tools both for research and publication. Those with the second focus will more profitably connect with established groups, not necessarily interdisciplinary.

I would regret Digital Humanities occupying all of Research Methods while at the same time agreeing that this consolidation is important and overdue. Since Library and Archive Studies and Media Studies are going to go forward, though, it seems on balance to be really powerful. The interdisciplinarity of DH is somewhat at odds with DH practices within language and literary study, as discussed in comments above, and thus the Genre division is always going to prompt some objections on that score.

The notion that “genre and media studies” might foreground technology is an excellent one. In that spirit, though, I’d note that one technological medium of “drama and performance” might be reincorporated into the MLA by rephrasing the field as “Drama, Theater, and Performance.” This label would have several positive consequences, not least of which would be rhetorically marking “performance” as a field not limited to “drama,” and so explicitly incorporating nondramatic modes of performance and performance analysis into the umbrella of MLA work. At the same time, it would also refuse to license a finally debilitating antitheatrical perspective sometimes still associated, in different ways, with both “drama” and “performance.” Of course, “theater” might also conceivably be filtered into “and Other Arts,” or “Opera,” or “Popular Culture,” but naming it would give it a local habitation in the MLA.

There’s been some pretty brilliant work on Adaptation recently (some of which includes cultural analyses that fall outside the scope of Drama and Performance), and so I’m wondering if Adaptation might warrant its own emergent field under Genre and Media Studies (“Adaptation Studies”)?

I see Bill Worthen’s point, and agree with his concern, that performance is not limited to drama. I wonder if a solution might be to have this group be “drama” and another group called “performing arts,” which would include theater and opera and even dance. Given that “nonfiction prose” and “poetry” are listed as groups, I wouldn’t want to lose “drama” as a group; nor would I want to limit the categories of performance that are open for study.

Given the prominence of “performance studies” (including history and theory of performance and peformance practice) and “global drama” in current advertisements for teaching positions in drama (in the MLA JIL and the CHE, e.g.), I agree with parts of the comments by both Bill Worthen and Sarah Werner.

As a longtime member of the MLA Drama Division (over 40 years), I would not want to lose the main mission of that Division either. The current Division of Drama: “Drama (History, Criticism & Theory)” is rather broad, however, and it already does incorporate performance studies (theories and practices) and opera, viewed as a musical type of drama, since drama is literary genre that is both read and performed. I think that the intention is actually to broaden the current division to include specifically performance (studies) but not to lose “History, Criticism & Theory” as areas of concern.

The MLA members who will choose the subcategory of Drama and Performance as an area of interest will bring their own concerns with “History, Criticism & Theory” of both drama and performance in selecting future topics of sessions (panels) or the proposed 3-year seminars, it seems to me.

Omission in the proposed subcategory for “Opera” of “as a literary and peformance genre” might seem to be removing opera from concerns of the Drama and Performance subcategory. But, as suggested, there are “transdisciplinary connections” which might be made if the two subcategories shared topics of special sessions in the future (which has been a relatively recent possibility in the MLA “Creative Conversations” rubric for divisions and allied organizations (to get together in proposing to share a session).

Perhaps performance theories (a concern of performance studies) might also be addressed in a new category of “Literary and Cultural Theory,” which has already been proposed by others, or its incorporation in the “Transdisciplinary Connections” category, already part of this current proposal? Theater (theatre) is a medium of dramatic performance, and so “Media Studies,” a subcategory of the proposed “Genre and Media Studies” might also admit theater (theatre) as a topic of concern.

Given the mission of the MLA (Modern Language Association of America), which has not (yet!) changed its name to include more than “Modern Language”-related matters, though this proposal might make the Association’s name itself seem outdated), such “performing arts” would still need to be related in some ways to language and literature.

There already are associations to which scholars and teachers of theater (theatre) belong involving theater (theatre) per se, to which many of us who are members of the Drama division also belong: e.g., ATHE and TCG. It is important to recognize that many MLA members are members of other disciplinary or cross-disciplinary professional associations too; many college and university teachers of dramatic literature (drama) teach courses cross-listed in theater (theatre) or theatre arts departments.

The MLA Division of Drama (History, Criticism, & Theory) might seem to be concerned more with drama as a literary genre than as a practical theater (theatre) discipline; however, in my experience of attending many of this Division’s sessions for over four decades, theories and practical aspects of drama in performance are very often topics of papers presented; “History, Criticism & Theory” often has involved and does involve the history of actual performances, critical performance reviews, and theories and accounts of acting, directing, scenic design, and other aspects of theatrical presentation. Clearly, drama is a cross-disciplinary genre, not only a literary genre. Its presentation on stage involves so many other disciplines, which often results in non-MLA members from other disciplines getting permission to present or appear in special sessions offered by the Division (e.g., actors, directors, designers, filmmakers, etc.).

The proposed sectioning off of “Opera” in its own subcategory really does give that type or subgenre of Drama its own separate space, which might be especially useful to scholars and teachers of opera given the importance of music and voice and choreography to the performance of opera and other musical theater. (I do wonder if the subcategory needs to be larger to include both opera and other types of musical theater?)

There is some possibility that adding “Music and Literature” (e.g.) as a subcategory in “Transdisciplinary Connections” might perhaps be a space for both operatic and non-operatic interests and studies of other kinds of connections between music and literature not specific to drama. The same point might pertain to “Art and Literature” as a proposed subcategory in “Transdisciplinary Connections.”

not sure what the conversation leading up to this change was, but the change takes us to a VERY broad category, that includes material culture. So I am seeking clarification concerning what this change is aimed at achieving.

I also propose a couple of other categories that are NOT meant to replace “FOLKLORE or FOLKLORE and LITERATURE.

Folktale & Fairy-tale Studies

this is where a lot of interdisciplinary scholarship is focused now & across media as well as literatures in various languages; journals and courses are also contributing to institutionalizing the field.

There has also been some talk of more cooperation btw the Folklore & Literature group and the Children’s and YA Literature group.

1) “Folklore” is indeed a very broad category that encompasses cultural production not often studied by scholars affiliated with the MLA. I too question why this division name was changed.

2) Folk- and Fairy-Tale Studies is now a thriving field with a strong comparative dimension. While scholars working in this field generally find a “home” under the “Folklore” label, this field deserves its own division.

3) Finding a way to develop connections between “Folklore” and “Children’s/YA Literature” is a good idea, even though the two remain distinct fields.

Although I understand that “book” includes both printed and not printed, I think it is misleading. Manuscripts and manuscript studies are nowhere to be found, but manuscripts are central for cultural communication even in cultures that use the printing press (or similar artifacts). The related group also focuses on print and digital, but nothing about manuscripts.

I totally agree with Jesús RV. Manuscripts have their own histories and coexist with printed books in a sometimes symbiotic relationship. To omit them is troubling, and reveal a bias. Indeed, there are other forms of books that are neither print nor manuscript: I am thinking of tablets, cuneiform, etc. The related group fails to acknowledge these categories.

I agree with John Young above (comment on Book History and Print Culture), that editing is becoming increasingly important as we turn more and more to digital publishing. There is an overlap with Digital Humanities and with Print, Digital and Information Culture, but perhaps Editing and Textual Studies is deserving of a category in its own right. It would be unfortunate to do away with “Bibliography” when it is so important to the study of books and literature — now perhaps more than ever when online digitized facsimiles are increasingly available to be studied in addition to the physical objects themselves). Would Bibliography, Editing, and Textual Studies work as a category?

To me, one of the key elements of the “Libraries and Research…” group was the interplay between libraries and the research or teaching process. I’m concerned that in either of these proposed groups that the library and librarians could become only an object rather than actor. Academic librarians in the MLA help create and maintain trans-disciplinary connections within the field of literature and beyond. It is this active role of the Library and Librarians in scholarship, research, teaching, archiving and planning for the future that I think needs to be brought out and discussed, as we have in our programs. I would want to be assured that this critical aspect of the current group would be maintained in the new.

The Bibliography and Textual Studies committee is grateful to the MLA for the work it has done on this proposed revision to the group structure. Quoted below is part of the text of an email I sent on behalf of the BTS committee in April in response to an MLA query about this possible name change. I will post it both here and as a comment to the related paragraph 27:

“In general, our group thinks, in one member’s words, that ‘we’d be limiting, rather than opening up, our range by aligning with one of the other subfields’ listed. Another says that ‘although my library colleagues are usually wonderfully supportive of bibliography and textual studies, it’s in many ways very different from what they do.’ This is my sense as well.
“With specific reference to the proposed mergers, one of us reports that she has ‘been to one of the meetings of the libraries and research group, and I think that they wouldn’t be a good fit. As I understand it, their focus is largely on the future of libraries and the way that impacts research–questions that we’re interested in as well, but in a different way.’
“With respect to the broader question of merging towards division status, I think it’s important that bibliography and textual studies are concerned with methodological questions that bridge all areas of literary study. The proposed division titles move away, for example, from the recent turn to the digital humanities that’s characterized many of our panels (such as the 2013 one, for example, or the ones created by Matt Kirschenbaum a few years ago). It seems like the direction we’d want to move if we were combined into a division would be towards methods of literary history more broadly, rather than implicitly limiting us as the suggested names do to a material form.”
—

For my own part, I second the observations by others in the comments here that the proposed revisions seem to deprecate manuscript studies, at a moment when the critical energy around the history of non-print forms is no less exciting and potentially transformative than that which engages the digital.

While it is true, as Matthew Kirschenbaum suggests, that a library is neither a genre nor a medium, librarians and archivists are generally concerned with the ways in which knowledge is shaped by the technologies used to produce and distribute it. Their concern with the function and fate of the historical record demands an engagement with the materiality of the archive and so does align them with digital humanities and media studies.

I agree with Marlene and certainly do not see libraries and archives as belonging in transdisciplinary connections. Librarians and archivists who are engaged in and support literary studies are deeply woven into the fabric of scholarship.

No disagreement from me on that last, Sarah. We’re all singing from the same hymnal here. Which is why, for me, reducing the depth and complexity of those interweevings to a form of “Genre and Media Studies” (the category in which we are currently situated) is a much greater disservice than something called, however amorphously, “Transdisciplinary Connections.” To the extent you perceive the latter as distancing, that also does not strike me as wholly inappropriate: librarianship and archivy in fact *are* distinct professions and professionalizations, and not reducible to a set of shared interests among MLA members.

On a more tactical note, while it’s not clear to me what purpose those high-level rubrics will serve at an organizational level, there may well be some value to having the shared concerns of DH, Textual Scholarship, and Libraries and Archives represented in multiple categories rather than all together side-by-side in a single one.

Matthew is right that the super-headings are merely organizational but inasmuch as they help us read the map of the association’s scholarly organization, they are important and thus I appreciate all of these suggestions which are sure to be helpful in the next stages of revision.

I would like to second the comments from Matthew K., Sarah W, and others. This matter of classification/taxonomy has a long and vexed history in librarianship, as it does in an all human endeavors, and no matter the scheme adopted nothing will feel quite right to everyone. I agree with the view that “genre” is a less good place in the schema for dh, and for libraries/archives than a place that foregrounds institutional , professional, and pedagogical issues. Given the other groups classified there, they would also look out of place in “transdisciplinary.”

I am running to be elected into this group in a few days, so the change in its names feels especially troubling to me. It would be great if the group developed into a division during my 6-year term, if I win. But the proposed name changes suggest a total re-direction. I applied to join the group because the name suggested a study of Bibliographies and Textual scholarship. I am completing a 3-year MLA Bibliography fellowship and I’ve published 2 scholarly books with bibliographies for McFarland – so I am an expert in the first word on the list. The second term referred to textual studies, which as a generalist I do regularly as I examine various types of texts. The new suggested titles are complete re-directions. The first idea, “Library and Archival Studies,” suggests that it will be a group for librarians who are developing special collection archives for their libraries. This limits the pool of people who might attend the group’s meetings or who could actively participate in it to around 100 special archive librarians around the US, most of whom are not members of the MLA. The second idea, “Print, Digital and Information Culture,” implies that the group will now be studying the culture of how information is processed. The term seems to step from the title of the Center for Print and Digital Culture at the University of Wisconsin, which describes its mission as, “We encourage scholarly work on the authorship, reading, publication and distribution of print–and now digital–materials, produced by those at both the center and the periphery of power.” Does this suggest that this group will study the publishing process by independent and corporate as well as digital and print publishers? While I run a publishing company, Anaphora Literary Press, and this still fits my areas of expertise, everybody who is currently a member of this discussion group is likely to be displaced out of their area of expertise. In addition, if this group focuses on print and digital publishing – there will be no group in the MLA that focuses on textual scholarship, something that in theory all MLA members should be doing at some point in their careers, even if only when they complete their graduate degree(s). The MLA offers a bibliography fellowship, and maintains one of the top bibliography system – the MLA style of bibliographies – how can it delete from its list of groups the one group with “bibliography” in its title? Also, some texts are books, as not all texts are “archival.” The fact is that the group’s name should be left as-is without either of these changes. Bibliography refers to the MLA Bibliography, and the term “textual” includes print, digital, archival and all other possible types of texts that might be invented in the next decades. I’d be happy to join the group regardless of the name, but I would prefer if the name reflected the goals of the group so that we would receive session proposers won’t be misled. I hope this reply will help MLA make their final decision. Sincerely, Anna Faktorovich, PhD , Director, Anaphora Literary Press, http://anaphoraliterary.com, director@anaphoraliterary.com

I’m certainly sympathetic to the desire to not lose either the bibliography or textual scholarship terminology. However, I can’t help but note a certain condescension and failure to understand the range of issues addressed by librarians and archivists and the critical role they play in defining, maintaining and presenting access to the scholarly record. Any librarian or archivist participating in the MLA is likely to be engaged in building literature collections in academic or research libraries, have knowledge of what is and has been published across a wide range of literary fields, have an advanced degree in literature and considerable knowledge of the ways in which both students and scholars use their collections. A library and archival studies group would provide a forum for discussion of issues crucial to the future of literary research. These might included the ways in which we can shape the future of scholarly publishing, respond to corporate ownership of both scholarship and search tools, understand the impact of new kinds of digital archives, better understand what constitutes meaningful digital humanities and digitization projects, and improve the ability of students (and faculty) to conduct literary and interdisciplinary research in an environment filled with new tools provided by libraries, corporate entities and scholars themselves.

I did not imply any condescension towards librarians. As a librarian, you must logically agree that the new terms being suggested are completely illogical. Textual and Bibliographic studies is a term that includes the study of all sorts of texts held in the library, and the MLA Bibliography has a record of a significant portion of items held in a library and the closest field of study to a librarian is bibliographic and records studies. While some librarians might be interested in digital archives, most do not create digital archives, but still maintain printed books and established archive collections like EBSCO and ProQuest. Surely, no librarian can logically argue that the MLA Bibliography is not one of the most significant items that the MLA maintains and that the MLA Handbook (which dictates citation guidelines for MLA bibliographic sources) is not among the key responsibilities of the MLA. My argument is not at all based on emotions like “condescension,” but simply on my logical aversion of illogical changes that detract, instead of benefiting a field that I am engaged in. I have published 2 academic books with McFarland and I’m finishing a third in which Columbia University Press has expressed interest. I have also recently won a new fellowship to write a literary biography of Wendell Berry. I use citations daily, I finished a 3-year MLA Bibliography fellowship, and I would like to see the MLA keep the Bibliography and bibliographic research as one of its key focuses. I don’t think it’s appropriate for you to insult me saying that I’m “condescending.” I would have hoped that those who might argue with me would present logic and would not rely on emotional attacks to get their points across. Sincerely, Anna Faktorovich, PhD, Director, Anaphora Literary Press, http://anaphoraliterary.com

Is this group intended to look at libraries/archives and librarians/archivists, and what they can add to scholarship, or collections and the way literature is gathered and presented? If the former, then Genre and Media Studies does seem like an odd fit. If the latter, then it fits quite well. The way libraries collect, group and provide access to literature has an interesting interplay with genre studies that could do with more discussion.

For example, academic libraries often fail to consider genre as a factor when designing collections of literature, and are more likely to group collections by time and/or place, while genre plays a bigger role in public libraries (who also have a larger focus on Reader Advisory – a field that considers genre very carefully and would not be completely out of place in an academic library with a literature collection, but tends to be ignored in more “scholarly” settings).

This is very relevant for undergraduate students, as the way libraries collect and present literature can have a profound effect on what students find and read. My library, for example, has sections dedicated to literature from different commonwealth counteries, but no method (at all) for searching for genre. If a student wanted to explore New Zealand Literature they would be well served. If, however, they wanted to focus on science fiction? They would have great difficulty, and the librarians are not well positioned to help them with the current collection policies and discovery tools.

Such considerations could be regarded as inderdisciplinary and belonging to the “service” of libraries, but I also think the way we make literature available is (or should be) connected to the way we communicate the importance and relevance of genre and media.

I think the original groups were definitely more Transdisciplinary than Genre and Media Studies in nature, but I also think that collecting literature is fundamentally connected to understanding genre, and libraries and archives should be considered in this light. A discussion group about libraries and collections belongs in any consideration of genre.

So my Question/Comment is: Why can’t there be a Library/Archive section in both places? The group in Genre Studies to deal specifically with literature collections (and their implications), and a group in the Transdicipline area to cover the scholarship associated with bibliographic studies and information culture?

A category such as “Research Methods” or “Research Methodologies” might be able to include some of the practical aspects of theory (literary and cultural theory). ” Critical Theory” can still be included in the “Literary Criticism” subcategory in “Genres and Media Studies” (though there are problems mentioned by others with the inclusion of “Digital Humanities” as a “Genre” or as an example of “Media Studies”, suggesting that Media Studies may need its own category.

Similarly, it seems to me also that the related group of a new subcategory called “Library and Archive Studies” or “Print, Digital, and Information Culture” does not adequately incorporate “Bibliography and Textual Studies” (which also included textual editing of the kind involved in the CEAA, a major MLA awards category). Such subcategories as “Digital Humanities” and these others could perhaps more logically appear in a larger category like Archive, Bibliography, Library, and Textual Studies, which it seems would include textual editing theories and practices (of the kind used by the CEAA).

Like others before me, I thank those who have contributed so much time and energy to developing the proposed new MLA Group Structure.

Life Writing is the phrase many of us in the field of autobiography studies now use to signal the diversity of modes, media, and genres of self-referential acts and practices. This is an encompassing term that gathers under it practices from performance art to memoir, biography to autoethnography, social media to posthuman body projects, traditional auotbiography to hagiography and on and on. Thanks for proposing this change.

This category seems a little vague and old-fashioned to me, especially since several of the “other arts” have been granted their separate designations now. One art form that (with the exception of “Opera”) is missing from the list is music, or more generally, the arts of sound, which is a growing field that has generated quite a lot of contemporary interest (from museums as well as literary critics). I would suggest eliminating the category of “Literature and Other Arts” and replacing it in the following ways: 1) Change the category currently designated “Cinema and the Moving Image” to something like “Visual Cultures or Media” in order to include still images (photography, illustration, painting, sculpture, maybe even architecture); 2) Create a new category on “The Arts of Sound” or “Soundscapes” (or some other designation) that would specify auditory art forms; 3) Create another category on “Performance” or “Theater and Performance” to include the dramatic arts.

I think that Cinema and the Moving Image should stay a discrete category and not merge with something like “Visual Cultures and Media.” Of course, film is a medium, as is everything that we study as teachers and scholars. But if there is a Comics and Graphic Narratives group (I am on the Executive Committee for that group), there should certainly be, also, a discrete film category. I wouldn’t want to throw everything that is visual together into some large-rubric category like “Visual Cultures and Media.” These forms, as we study and write about them, are constantly in conversation with other forms; transmedia analysis deeply informs the study of film, photography, comics, illustration, and gaming–for instance, in a forthcoming issue of Critical Inquiry on “Comics and Media,” two film theorists write brilliantly about the conversation happening between film and comics; one even writes about film, comics, and sculpture. So while this kind of work characterizes so much study (especially in English, my department, in terms of the ongoing conversation between literature and film), I also really do think forms like film merit their own category within the MLA. I don’t think we’re in danger of being too narrow here. I am interested in trying in coming years to do do some kind of collaboration between the MLA and the CAA (College Art Association), and the SCMS (Society for Cinema and Media Studies). But I do believe that the groups as they are should be able to retain a certain degree of medium-specificity as a starting point for analysis and as an organizing principle.

That said, about Literature and Other Arts, I’ve never been sure what the “other arts” in the title of this group are supposed to be–so maybe some clarification here might help define the work of the group. “Literature in Relation to Other Arts”?

In a comment on paragraph (section) 32, I have suggested adding subcategories of “Music and Literature” and “Art and Literature” to the “Transdisciplinary Connections” category; it seems to me that “Literature and Other Arts” belongs in “Transdisciplinary Connections” more than it does in “Genre and Media Studies.” (Please see my additional comment on paragraph (section) 38, as it relates to this comment.)

Considering that the Society for Cinema Studies changed its name to Society for Cinema and Media Studies some years ago, I’m not sure why the categories of Cinema and the Moving Image and Media Studies are separated here. Cinema has long ha complex relationships with other media, including radio. As the notion of “media” has been substantially broadened in the last couple of decades, and as the nature of “cinema” has become increasingly diffuse through the proliferation of media (including digital) platforms for production, distribution and dissemination, the separation of “cinema” and “media” seems increasingly artificial.

I concur with Donald’s observation. Combine these groups into “Media Studies.” This is not unlike the principles animating the thread at “Book History et al” that the more inclusive, non-medium-specific rubric makes more sense where methodologies overlap.

“Media Studies” would seem to include studies of film (cinema); but “Cinema and the Moving Image” is incorporating the medium of film (“the big screen”) and also apparently television (“the small screen”); whereas, perhaps radio will be in “Media Studies.” (I appreciate the earlier comment about radio by Donald F. Larsson.)

It would be helpful to have a description (as some have already suggested) of “Media Studies” so that we know which media are to be included. Newer generations of students seem to thing media involves television, blogs (web logs or web-based diaries), social media like Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and other electronic bulletin boards); but scholars and earlier generations of students would think of Marshall McLuhan’s “the medium is the message” and of media in a larger sense as the technological platform (screen) through which content (“the message”) is communicated. Given that “Cinema and the Moving Image” has been given a separate category, I do fear the loss of this historical understanding of media studies.

Please see my related comments on section 32 (Drama and Performance) and 37 (Literature and Other Arts).

I understand why Life Writing is the way it is. But why did we retain Nonfiction Prose? It might be possible to collapse these two groups (and here I speak as the Chair of the current Life Writing Division) and call the group Life Writing and Nonfiction Prose?

Originally the Nonfiction Prose name, before it was reconfigured, indicated that it in particular excluded Biography and Autobiography–it was Nonfiction Prose Studies, Excluding Biography and Autobiography. (And I guess it’s the twin of the Prose Fiction category.) Do you really think it makes sense, then, to include it in/alongside Life Writing? It’s not as though original intention has to be honored, but the collapse seems to do something the group was specifically configured to avoid. I wonder about genres of literary journalism that wouldn’t necessarily comfortably be part of Life Writing (?). But maybe that lack of fit is an interesting intellectual question from the vantage point of Life Writing in terms of thinking where its boundaries are and where they can expand to. I’m interested in where, say, studies of New Journalism, and all sorts of other modes of reportage that followed and persist and exist today might fit along this axis…

I can’t help but note a certain condescension and failure to understand the range of complex issues addressed by librarians and archivists and the critical roles they play in defining, maintaining and presenting access to the scholarly record. Any librarian or archivist participating in the MLA is likely to be engaged in building literature collections in academic or research libraries, have knowledge of what is and has been published across a wide range of literary fields, have an advanced degree in literature and considerable knowledge of the ways in which both students and scholars use their collections. A library and archival studies group would provide a forum for discussion of issues crucial to the future of literary research. These might included the ways in which we can shape the future of scholarly publishing, respond to corporate ownership of both scholarship and search tools, understand the impact of new kinds of digital archives, better understand what constitutes meaningful digital humanities and digitization projects, and improve the ability of students (and faculty) to conduct literary and interdisciplinary research in an environment filled with new tools provided by libraries, corporate entities and scholars themselves.

I am in favor of this change from Poetry (History, criticism and theory) to Poetry and Poetics. I think it creates a stronger link between poetry and theories of poetry that should prove fruitful. Histories of poetry and criticism of poetry both fit in with other groups, such as historical periods, national or transnational groupings, etc.

I appreciate the change to “Poetry and Poetics,” but I am concerned to see that the MLA appears to have no plan or place to recognize the emergence of what has been called “hybrid” (perhaps better named “trans-genre”) literature. from the works of Gertrude Stein through Jean Toomer’s Cane to Theresa Cha’s Dictee (in the 20th century) and the writing of Anne Carson (to choose a few exemplars), there’s a line of literary works created to challenge the genre categories–and the production of such works is increasing with extraordinary speed. Prose fiction and nonfiction are no longer clearly separate entities, criticism and autobiography were mixed by Jane Tompkins in the 1980s and have not come entirely apart since, and the word “poetry” is being used to describe whatever seems difficult–no matter what it looks like on the page. Meanwhile there’s an ongoing renaissance of contemporary authors who have demonstrated that they will continue to challenge and complicate the understandings shaping these older genre group formations. I would be sorry to see that the work put in to these revisions of MLA groups only works to prepare the institution for the past. Let’s prepare for the future, by putting a “trans-genre” group in the list now.

Is is worth adding “Speculative Fiction,” which has become a common description, to this title (perhaps replacing one of the other terms)? Out of curiosity I just typed “speculative fiction” into the MLA Intl. Bibliography and 239 results came up.

I am really not sure we need to divide African lit this way: sub saharan and southern? If we are going to do that then we might as well have eastern and western and central also. This does not make a whole lot of sense.

In view of Professor Hirsch’s declaration that the proposed division of African Literature would be reviewed, I would like to encourage the MLA not only to retain the current “African Literatures” group as it is, but to do so in recognition of the following: “African Literatures” is, for many of us today, as much a field as it is a reading strategy. The latter, as I see it, designates that shift which, over the past two decades, has seen African literary criticism go from ethno-nationalist to con-textual, transnational, and comparative analyses. It is partly in light of this development that the partitioning of African Literature into “Southern African” and “Sub-Saharan African” represents a regressive entrenchment in the MLA of divisions that few scholars today would see as having any intellectual merit.

Thank you – I am glad to hear that Africa divided between “Sub Saharan” and “Southern African” is being rethought.

There is no easy way to divide the “African” group – the pre/post 1960 or 1990 divide is problematic as different places have had different dates of independence from colonial rule. Though dividing by language group may seem better, there are many indigenous languages spoken in Africa and it could be politically incorrect to divide according to Lusophone, Anglophone, Francophone (legacies of colonialism, all) – and then “indigenous”, which atomises or Balkanises if one looks at individual language groups. And what about oral literature?

Do we need to manufacture subgroups to increase our presence? One could possibly have West, East, North and South African or colonial and postcolonial African but why do this? Should we simply have “African literatures” (plural) or “African Languages and Literatures” (plural) and make a deliberate point in our group structure by not carving up Africa (again)?

One risk could be the implication that African language and literature has had no history or periodisation worth mentioning. Does the argument against dividing Africa outweigh this risk? What do others think? What leads can we follow from the African Studies Association and other academic organizations that focus on research about Africa?

Then there is another question: Since there is a group/subgroup for “South Asian and South Asian Diasporic”, should we have “African and African Diasporic” or “African and African Diasporic Literatures” or “African and African Diasporic Languages and Literatures”?

I think this issue with Africa is challenging because it goes to the heart of the matters that the MLA is trying to address.

May I ask that we think more carefully about the reasons for organising the MLA into groups and sub-groups? Though I am aware that re-organising the groups is a challenging task, at the moment there seem to be gaps (certain areas and peoples not represented), and inconsistencies across groups and sub-groups.

It is entirely appropriate to expand African Literatures into two groups. Perhaps a chronological division would be less polarizing than the geographic divisions under discussion. Given the contemporary flourishing of African literature, how about African Literatures Before 1980 (or ?) and Late 19th-and Early 20th Century African Literatures?

I really have a hard time understanding how Southern African can suddenly emerge as a field of study that is so different from African Studies that it deserved a whole designation at the MLA. Where does Southern African Studies begin and where does it end? Is the MLA going to follow the political map of what is generally refer to as Southern African? In that case, the Democratic Republic of the Congo would be a candidate? There ought to be a clearly articulated intellectual and may I say, epistemologic rationale for establishing new divisions. In this case, I do not see any. I’m therefore left to conjecture and speculate about the motives behind the irruption of this new field. The MLA should follow the lead of the two major associations dedicated to the study of Africa in North America: the African Literature Association and the African Studies Association. I would also add the Canadian Association of African Studies. These professional academic associations do not discriminate between Sub-Saharan and Southern African. So should the MLA. I strongly called on the Committee in charge of drafting this new map to review its copy and affirm the vibrancy of the study of Africa without introducing artificial divisions. I would remind the MLA that Southern Africa, thanks to the apartheid regime, became a rallying point for African activism from the establishing of the African Union (then the Organization of African Unity) until the defeat of the racist regime in the early 1990s. South African President Thabo Mbeki made a powerful speech stating that “I am African”. And Nelson Mandela made a point of attending, while in office, all the meetings of the African Union. Mbeki did not claim that he was South African, for he knew very well that Southern Africa (including the front line countries that help defeat apartheid) were African. It is high time that the MLA register the expressive and creative cultures of Africa in their richness, but with the awareness of these common bonds. I strongly register my opposition to this proposal and call on the MLA to reconsider its draft. cilas kemedjio

I would also like to add my very strong objections to the proposal for splitting up the African Literature Division into Sub-Saharan and Southern African. Southern African is clearly an ill-disguised mask for South Africa that is not likely to fool anyone in the field. Throughout the period of Apartheid it was commonly asserted in South Africa that Africa started north of the Limpopo and that South Africa was different. This was a species of political thinking that sought to define and rule (to cite the title of Mahmood Mamdani’s recent book) by separating the “native” Africans from the more civilized South Africans. Sadly, it is one that persists to this day and that generates a stupendous degree of narrow mindedness and plain xenophobia. The further problems of this kind of thinking are too numerous to detail here, but three in particular come to mind. First is that the mode of exceptionalism implied in the reference to the north of the Limpopo was an ideological ruse to get black South Africans not to consider the many ways in which their destinies were and are still tied to those of the rest of the continent. Any Africanist looking at the post-Apartheid politics of South Africa today will conclude that there is something eerily Nigerian about it, from the procedures that spewed forth Jacob Zuma to the internal familial struggles over the legacy of Nelson Mandela. And these can only be seen when taken from an informed comparative African perspective. The second concern is that this suggested split will enhance the view of South African literature as more akin to the literatures of other settler colonies such as Australia and Canada rather than to that of the continent on which the country is situated. There are good reasons for investigating such a claim, but not at the expense of exploring the many links that South African literature has with that of the rest of Africa. That the suggested division would also sanction the hiring of faculty that have exclusive expertise in one region but no knowledge of anything elsewhere is deeply worrying. This is already an existing trend that should be reversed rather than encouraged. What is the use of hiring a new faculty member that knows everything about Coetzee but almost nothing about Soyinka or vice versa?

If this is in effect a division representing literature from former settler colonies in Africa, why leave out Kenya, or for that matter Algeria? Why retain Zambia, or for that matter Malawi? In other words, this is a division without internal consistency and whose rationale cannot be sustained. I fully concur with Ato: South Africa in particular is becoming ever more ‘African’ with every passing day. We should not be surprised. Kenya now resembles other postcolonies in its immediate region as does Algeria.

If we are going to do regional divisions for African literature, then all of its regions should be represented, as suggested by Joya. However, I do not think divisions by geography are the best way to capture the dominant trends in literature from the continent or to provide additional opportunities for discussing African literature at the MLA. Time/epoch and language (for example indigenous language literatures) might be more useful constructs for rethinking the division. A division for African Diasporic literature that is separate from the division for African American literature might also be a useful one to consider given the emergence of literature from new and emergent African diasporas that are connected with multiple sites and literary traditions.

I agree with the comments made by colleagues that the newly MLA initiated idea of breaking up African literature into (sub) divisions is problematic in many ways. Such division is not merely administrative, but ideologically constructive. As Ato Quayson rightly points out, one troubling implication of this partition is that it adds to the further white-washing of South African literature while, let’s be honest about it when we are on it, the category of Sub-Saharan literature seems to be a code for (black) West African literature. Were this proposal to come through, I wonder where the literatures of the Greater Horn of Africa, East Africa, North and Central Africa, and the new African diaspora would fall into the re-mapping. I also wonder why at this age of global aesthetics African literature would need to being split up into such restricting and alienating divisions. It seems ironic especially when our prominent theorists, such as Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Akin Adesokan, are publishing works meant to underscore Africa’s collective contribution to world literature by illustrating its creative and theoretical vitality in terms of voicing subaltern resistance, aimed at de-dichotomization and de-hierarchization. I would like, therefore, to ask those of you who represent African literature in MLA to push back against this new proposition and argue instead to retaining the name/division “African Literature,” without drawing regional or national borders. Although the ALA may not be a perfect model, please remember that it has been a glue in keeping us together as teachers and researchers of African literature over the years. Part of the appeal of belonging to the association is its understanding to retain the deliberately vague term “African literature” as a conceptual category for all constituents to work with. And this has served well the association and its members, despite the different histories and orientations of the diverse literatures of the continent. No term/naming is neutral. Having said that, the general term “African literature” seems to me more practical and purposeful to hold on to than the proposed MLA idea, which (and I don’t doubt MLA’s good intentions) appears to be raising more complications-both practical and theoretical.

The proposal is absolutely stranger than fiction. Pray, where is its _scholarly_ content? I have gone several times to read the principles governing the reorganization and just can’t find any that applies in this case. What is “Southern African” that is not “Sub-Saharan African”? Who, even with the slightest knowledge of the literary traditions in Africa, would make such a proposal? And where is north Africa? Whoever suggested this break up is obviously motivated by things other than a scholarly understanding of the comparative histories of the literary traditions on the continent. Very unfortunately, as Ato, Moradewun, and others have pointed out or implied, there is an old, cliched and prejudiced model that this seems to following. The battle against that model began to be won in the 1980s and now MLA wants to resuscitate it, turn back the hand of the clock? And this is the MLA with the greatest storehouse of expertise in literatures of the world? The acutely socially conscious and committed MLA that we have all come to be extremely proud of? How did this proposal make it to this stage on an _MLA_ platform?

I don’t think Achebe would like to be perpetually right but it was he who said, long ago, that, somehow somehow, many a time a discussion reaches an Africa topic among some of the “smartest” of us and of our best friends, the discussion rapidly degrades; peoples become “tribes” and languages become “dialects.” It is odd that I am feeling so personally let down by the MLA on this. Scholarly emptiness and retrograde ideology couldn’t have come together so nicely. And in my MLA??

I agree with everything you have said here. As I noted in the General Comments above, this particular division by geography makes no sense to me whatsoever, and Teju you are absolutely right in that it takes us backwards! If the idea is to have two groups rather than one, I suggest (see above) doing in chronologically. I’d love to hear what you all think about the suggestion above.

I share the concerns articulated above, and so I am gratified to read in Marianne’s message that this division is being revisited. In some ways the groupings MLA adopts will serve to foster work in the designated areas, so I hope that careful consultation with senior scholars in African lit studies will be a part of the MLA process.

Speaking as a junior scholar, I agree with Lucy Graham (on the thread to paragraph 46) that dividing chronologically would present conceptual problems since the dates proposed are more relevant in certain locations than others. That said, 1960, a year when the wave of African independence really took off, seems preferable to 1990 (a date which, incidentally, is haunted by the South African exceptionalism that makes the current proposal so problematic, given the official end of apartheid).

Again, as Lucy notes, the South Asian group has been divided into literature on the one hand and popular culture/film/new media on the other. While that proposal generated much comment, could a similar split along media/popular culture lines be considered? The long history of African film studies (and growing interest in Nollywood etc) and the importance of popular culture/media has been apparent at several recent ALA and ASA sessions.

I agree with the tenor of these comments and am gratified that the organization seems to be getting the message. Do not divide the field geographically, especially not the way it was proposed. The comments above clearly state the shortcomings: creating the exceptional category Southern Africa and dropping North Africa out of the picture. Dividing the field historically with 1960 as the marker is the ok, but does not thrill me.

If the idea is to create a larger footprint for this field at the MLA (I strongly support this), then why not create a new category under a different group? why is Africa only named in this group whereas it could also have a presence more explcitly in the CLCS group, especially if we want more attention to African languages?

I am also glad that MLA is reconsidering the current proposed groups, while remaining committed to increasing the field’s presence in the MLA structure. It seems only two groups are possible. If so, dividing the two via a geopolitical or chronological marker (they can be read similarly) would likely produce concern and comment for years to come.

I like suggestions from Tsitsi here and Lucy (para 46) to have something like the grouping in South Asian along the lines of media (paras 67 and 68). I also think that a group named “African and African Diasporic” or separately “African Diasporic” may be productive if the term diasporic continues to include migrations within the continent as well as beyond or to it, and a critical emphasis on the reading strategies produced in these specific comparative contexts (cf. Uzoma in para 46).

Whether we are exploring African literature and/ or African diasporic literature, it is essential to bear in mind ideas about translation and transnational location. In our citations and interpretations, we should always acknowledge a writer’s original medium of creative expression whilst offering a translation as accompaniment. It is important for students, scholars and general readers/ consumers of literature who may be literate in one or more languages to decide or discriminate as to the accuracy or otherwise of a given translation of a writer’s work.

Friends and colleagues,
The outpouring from veteran and newer voices has been clear: it would be irreponsible to divide African Literatures into North African, Sub-Saharan, and Southern African divisions. I’m grateful that MLA leaders have quickly recognized their initially misguided approach, and have asked us to propose others.
The key here, as Eleni and others have pointed out, is how to _expand_ African Literature’s divisional MLA footprint without irresponsibly _dividing_ Africa in a way reminiscent of past partitions. This is a tricky problem, where the solutions seem to cause more problems than they solve. A historical divide is tricky because most proposed dates (e.g. 1960) are terribly recent and, sadly, might leave the field 90/10 split to the more recent division. A European vs. African languages split might also have the same 90/10 membership divide – to say nothing of its theoretical flaws.
No genre-based split seems possible either: every one I conjure up falls apart under the slightest pressure. A “full” regional split among West, East, Southern, etc. Africas would likely generate more divisions than our group-size would merit, and bizarrely separate Senghor from Rabearivelo, Armah from Ngugi.
One thing I like in the MLA’s new proposed structure is the emergence of “regions beyond continents.” Thus a Moroccan author might now be engaged in at least six somewhat regional MLA groups: the African, Atlantic, Mediterranean, Global South, Modern Arabic, and Francophone divisions.
So perhaps we should ask ourselves: by what divisional innovation could writers of the African continent, in all their historical, linguistic, generic, and other forms of diversity, be maximally engaged? Would a new Indian Ocean division help, or is the literary or interpretive unity of that sphere as yet insufficiently established? The Black American Literature and Culture division seems likely to be renamed the African American and African Disaporic division; my own sense is that these should be _two_ divisions, fully recognizing the important overlap between the two. One benefit of a split there would be that a separate African Diasporic division would have more leeway to include Africa in its scope.
Clearly this problem does not readily generate its own solution; I would be grateful for others to elaborate, extend, or revise these few notes offered here. – David.

Dear colleagues:
I deeply appreciate the MLA’s efforts to rethink the organization of its divisions and discussion groups.
First, let me say that I support the proposal to dissolve the distinction between “discussion groups” and “divisions” into a new category: “groups.” Symbolically, at least, this change will go some way toward eliminating the intellectual hierarchy that the current distinction implies. And as scholars of language, literature, and other media, we know that symbolic capital is important. Yet words just as surely mystify. Whether material distinctions also will disappear is less sure: I note that the MLA still intends to apportion resources unequally, giving some “groups” one guaranteed session and others two during the proposed transition period. To invoke Orwell, then, some groups will be more equal than others.
That said, I find the proposed “map” of networks—presently organized under the broad categories “Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies,” “Genre and Media Studies,” “Languages, Literatures, and Cultures,” “Language Studies,” “Teaching and the Profession,” and “Transdisciplinary Connections”—out of sync with the MLA’s interest in jettisoning tired intellectual frameworks and in promoting more dynamic, fluid, transversal modes of knowledge-making in research and pedagogy, activism and advocacy. The subdivisions proposed in the “Languages, Literatures, and Cultures” category strike me as not as forward-looking as they could be. Why atomize the world’s languages, literatures, cultures into ever more infinitesimal particles? Why array these in such a way that they appear unrelated? I for one would like to see the “Languages, Literatures, and Cultures” category revised along the transcontinental lines currently envisioned under “Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies,” and perhaps also along transhistorical lines that at once concede and resist current periodizations.
Is there any unit, after all, that is not inherently heterogeneous—for all its apparent self-sameness—and therefore also inherently comparative?
I will cite just two cases in point: “African” and “Arabic.” First, I strongly oppose the proposed subdivision of the current Division on African Literature into “Southern African” and “Sub-Saharan African.” I echo the sentiments of many of the colleagues who already have posted here. The proposed subdivision perpetuates a fundamentally Eurocentric notion, at least as old as Hegel, that Africa “proper” is “sub-Saharan Africa”; it also, as Ato Quayson has noted, reifies the egregious apartheid-era distinction between South Africa and a denigrated African “core.” We would do well to recall the words of the South African writer and ANC activist Mazisi Kunene, who declared (in the pioneering trilingual, Third Worldist journal Afro-Asian Writings, in 1967), “There is a political fallacy which seeks to divide Africa into two segments: Africa, South of the Sahara and Africa, North of the Sahara. […] Arabic literature of North Africa, Nigerian, and Ethiopian literatures are as much an African heritage as Japanese is part of an Asian literary heritage,” and the better-known words of Frantz Fanon, whose Les Damnés de la terre (1961) warned against the desire to divide Africa into an “Afrique noire” and an “Afrique blanche.” I would suggest, then, that the current category “African Literature” be left as is—perhaps amending the present focus on literature be amended to “African Orature, Literature, and Media”—and the number of sessions accorded to the group expanded. The current category holds far more intellectual integrity than the subdivisions proposed, and the capaciousness and productive ambiguity of “African” better serve local, regional, and transregional scholarship on the continent’s oratures, literatures, and media.
Second, while the proposed subdivision of the current Division on Arabic Literature and Culture into “Classical and Postclassical Arabic” and “Modern Arabic” is, on its face, less egregious than the proposed vivisection of Africa, here too the strategy—while well-intentioned and in fact supported by some of my colleagues in the field—unwittingly ends up dividing and conquering a relatively small (if strong) community of established and emerging scholars. Here too I would propose that the MLA retain the category “Arabic Literature and Culture”—perhaps amending the name to “Arabic Literatures, Cultures, and Media,” which might better reflect the plurality of “Arabics” and modes of Arab cultural production that flourish in the world—and expand the number of sessions accorded to the group. As other scholars have pointed out, some of the most exciting work in Arabic literary and cultural studies today challenges the modern (and deeply ideological) theses of “decline” and “renaissance” that often have sequestered the “classical” from the “postclassical,” the “premodern” or (denigrated) “medieval” from the “modern.” To my mind, at least, keeping Arabic “one” would be far better, intellectually and politically, than subdividing it by period or geography, given that so many of us in the field are working now—and many more of us will—to challenge and redefine hermetic periodizations and geographies.

Question again about whether “Early American” means “American” as in current “U.S. American”? Does it invite Native American studies, and again, if so, in what relation to modern nation-state boundaries? Native American is of coursed its own category, but I wanted to question whether these should be more formally inter-engaged throughout all the categories of “American…..”

I have been in this group as well as the late 19th and early 20th century English group. In both groups there was an attempt in setting up panels to be transatlantic and/or transnational. I can’t quite tell if the proposal here is to merge two groups into a Transatlantic Late 19th and Early 20th Century single group. The problem with this is that, oddly enough, the “transatlanticism” plays out differently between the two groups, with the American group using this not only as a vector to the UK etc. but also to Latin America, Mexico, the Caribbean, and so on; the converse happens in the English or British Late 19th and early 20th century, which for example would lose its chances to do diasporic Irish, global/empire concerns unless these fell under a “transatlantic” rubric that currently is stretched taut. That makes me more eager to see two groups remain, one Late 19th-and Early 20th Century Transnational American, and for British, ditto (English I think is a confusing term these days).

See the comments on paragraph 26. “Southern Literature” has been renamed “Regional Literature” and placed under “Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies.” To put it another way, “Southern Literature” has been eliminated.

I agree, and work in one such program myself. However, I think African American literature is by itself already a vast field that deserves its own division. Furthermore, and as I stated in my comments on the proposals for southern Africa literature, “a division for African Diasporic literature that is separate from the division for African American literature might also be a useful one to consider given the emergence of literature from new and emergent African diasporas that are connected with multiple sites and literary traditions.” I am thinking in particular of African diasporic literature emerging from new sites in Europe: Italy, Belgium, Germany and others. Then there’s literature from South America to consider…

I object vehemently to changing the Division of Black American Literature and Culture into the Division of African American and African Diaspora Literature. While the wording “Black American” does have problematic dimensions, most of us understand it to refer an ethnic identity and complex set of cultural expressions forged within the United States of America; the historical ontology of Black Amerian literature is sufficiently distinct from African-descended literatures in other parts of the Americas, so that conflation with African Brazilian literature is an open invitation to maximum confusion in scholarship and literary critical analysis. The murky logic behind the proposed change warrents a shift of American Literature to 1800 into a mega-division of post-colonial literature in English. The proposed change is grounded in embrace of “ahistoricity” under the pressures of the “historicity” hinted at but not overtly named in Professor Mark A. Reid’s comment. It would be a blatant act of bad faith and amnesia for me to support the proposed change.

I agree with both Jerry and Moradewun’s comments. As someone who works on African American and African diaspora literatures I think both fields are vast enough to warrant separate groups, even if they are often in conversation with each other. It seems bizarre to imagine that the most prominent U.S.-based professional organization for literature and languages would not have a full research group dedicated to African American literatures. At the same time, it is crucial to recognize the diversity of Africa-descended peoples across the globe so I would join Moradewun in urging that we have another group dedicated to African diasporic literatures, which could incorporate Afro-Canadian, Afro-European, Indian Ocean studies, as well as the vast field of Afro-Latin American material.

I oppose grouping African American and African Diasporic together in this fashion. I agree with many of the objections already discussed on this thread. This grouping is particularly confusing and problematic in that it places African Diasporic under the section designated as American (seeming to limit the range of the African diaspora). I’m not sure if placing African Diasporic under the African section would create more problems than it would solve (considering issues of language, for example), but it seems that some other configuration should be considered. I believe someone in the “Asian American and Asian Diasporic” thread (also showing much opposition) has suggested a Diasporic heading under which the various Diasporas could be grouped.

I am surprised to see that there’s only been one comment on here on this great addition even though the Presidential Forum last year focused on “Avenues of Access.” It would be interesting to see if this group also did work comparative work on other sign languages.
I am sure those of us hearing literary/language scholars would have a lot to learn from the fields of interpretation across sign languages.

I’m not sure I’m entirely comfortable with this expanded division name. Perhaps a separate division or discussion group in the Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies category called Asian Diasporic? The Asian American Literature division might additionally be renamed Transnational Asian American, but Asian Diasporic work seems vastly different in scope and perspective than anything that would reflect work in Asian American literary studies or any of expanded, allied, and comparative work in the field.

I agree. Although I think there can be productive exchange between Asian American and Asian Diasporic literary studies, Asian Diasporic deserves a category on its own–after all, there is plenty of Asian Diasporic literature outside the American context.

As a former member and chair of this division, and co-chair of the CLPC and a current member of a department that is called “Asian/ Asian American Studies” I cannot speak strongly enough against the conflation of this category within MLA. The Asian American literary division has been extremely important to the legitimacy of our field and in emphasizing our differences to a cold-war genealogy. In an era when departments and programs are being retrenched, I am reminded again of why we need to focus on the salience of “American” not to argue for an exceptionalism but because diasporic can theoretically encompass Asian Australian/ Fijian and other forms of minor transnationalisms that efface the specificities of the field Asian American. Like Paul, I am not against Transnational Asian American but Asian American and Asian diasporic is not something that explains our field even slightly. Perhaps an Asian diasporic field is better suited in the comparative field. There is certainly room for it and it will be much more salient in that space than in being conflated with our category.

I’m sure Timothy Yu, the current chair will weigh in on this in any second, but…the name change WAS NOT approved by anyone currently on the executive committee of the division of Asian American Literature. I believe the committee was not even consulted.

As the current chair of the division executive committee for Asian American Literature, I can confirm that our executive committee was not consulted on this name change and that we did not approve this change. It should therefore be considered a proposed name change (blue letters) rather than an approved change. I encourage all MLA members with an interest in Asian American literature to express their views on this proposed change.

Including “diasporic” may seemingly hold the potential to make global and transnational connections but it also undermines the historical struggles around charting a discernible Asian American literary and cultural tradition. Asian American literature must continue to be acknowledged on its own terms within the MLA and not erased because of pressures to collapse groups based on the misperceptions of those who do not fully understand fields other than theirs.

As another member of the division’s executive committee, I am writing to express concern about the change of the division title to include “Asian diaspora.” (As Timothy Yu has noted, the executive committee was not consulted on this.) This revision diverges substantially from the central critical concerns that have been historically addressed by the division. While the division (and the field) have not been hostile to diasporic–especially comparative–and transnational approaches, this change will have the effect of diluting a field that is already too often misunderstood within the discipline.

The introductory letter to this draft proposal states: “The list has benefited from two rounds of consultation with members of the executive committees of current divisions and discussion groups and from the advice of a large number of members, whose comments played a major role in shaping the current document.” And yet, the executive committee for the Division of Asian American Literature (AAL) was never consulted about the proposed name change to the group and certainly never approved of it. While I am not intellectually opposed to changing the division title, I am troubled by the fact that the suggested name change is being being presented as the result of an on-going conversation between the Asian American literature membership and the MLA’s working group and/or programming committee when, in fact, the exact opposite seems to be the case. The document does not offer any kind of intellectual justification for yoking together “Asian American” and “Asian Diasporic” Literature, and as anyone who has studied Asian American literature and culture knows, this kind of coupling has the potential to replicate all kinds of racist discourses that represent Asian Americans as inherently “foreign.” Any kind of name change suggestion should originate with and be thoroughly discussed in meetings by the division’s members before it is presented to the general membership in this manner.

I’m the current co-chair of the Committee on the Literatures of People of Color of the U.S. and Canada, and I’m also the Assembly Delegate for the Asian American Literature Division.

I’m strongly opposed to this name change. “Asian American Literature” still remains invisible and illegible to many in our discipline — let alone institutions. I concur with all the comments above. As Richard Rodriguez puts it, “Including ‘diasporic’ may seemingly hold the potential to make global and transnational connections but it also undermines the historical struggles around charting a discernible Asian American literary and cultural tradition.”

Also, as Timothy Yu and others point out above, while the coding of this group’s title suggests that its “name change [was] approved by its executive committee,” the AAL Division Executive Committee did NOT approve this name change, and therefore it should be coded blue, as a proposed name change.

I too am deeply uncomfortable with including Asian Diasporic studies here. As others have asserted, the focus on Asian American cultures is vital and necessary to articulating the U.S. national dimensions, and to the particular contours of Asian American Studies as an interdisciplinary field. It seems to me that Diaspora Studies is a distinct field, with different methodologies and approaches to national identification. To include it here is not to expand the focus of the MLA group, but rather to redefine it entirely. The distinct feature of the Asian American group is to contextualize and historicize race in the U.S. in a more nuanced way. This proposed change does something entirely different, and runs against the priorities of the MLA members who present as part of the Asian American group.

I, too, oppose the name change from “Asian American” to “Asian American and Asian Diasporic,” and echo the points given by Anita Mannur, Sue Kim, Tim Yu, Paul Lai, Jolie Sheffer, and others on this thread.

On the surface, the name change seems to be a gesture of inclusiveness that perhaps reflects the fact that many Asian Americanists move beyond a US-centric framework. However, I would argue that, both in practice and in terms of politics, this name change dangerously conflates Asian American Studies with Asian Studies. Many Asian Americanists such as myself can attest to the continuing struggle of making our field legible and visible. Over and over again, I have to explain to colleagues why Asian American Studies and Asian Studies are not the same, why I’m able to do my work without reading or writing in Chinese, why I don’t study authors from Asia, etc. These conversations happen even in the contexts of academic conferences such as the MLA. I fear that adding “Asian diasporic” to the group name evacuates the political resonance of the term “Asian American,” which is still very much needed. And since group designations may have impact on matters such as numbers of panels and papers allowed at a conference, I think we need to pay close attention to whether a seemingly more “open” group name would actually dilute the group’s focus and thus shrink opportunities the group can provide.
To be clear, I recognize that there are separate Asian Studies groups in the MLA as well, that “Asian diaspora” means something entirely different from “Asian Studies.” I recognize that there needs to be a way to recognize writers of Asian descent who are writing in English from places outside the US. I do not wish to replicate the kind of conflation or erasure that I am critiquing, nor do I wish to subscribe to US exceptionalism. I only speak from my day-to-day experience of working in a marginalized field that much of the academy still has trouble understanding and recognizing. I believe that it is still politically and practically necessary to retain the term “Asian American” as its own entity. As many on this thread have already pointed out, Asian diaspora studies and Asian American studies really are wholly different fields, and thus a more appropriate change would be to create a separate group for Asian Diasporic. That, I think would be a welcome and important addition.

Finally, I am deeply troubled that the executive committee for the Asian American division was never consulted about this proposed name change. That fact alone should warrant that this particular proposed name change be removed from the draft.

I do not support the name change. I would support it being transnational Asian American and a separate category entitled Asian Diasporas. Asian American is a US-based field and cannot be collapsed with diaspora. It also loses any sense of coherency as an intellectual field.

Given the discussions here and with reference to the Jewish Diasporic category, I propose that a new heading, Diasporic Literatures, be created, with groups called Asian Diasporic , Jewish Diasporic, General Diasporic, and others that members might make a case for.

I agree that “Jewish Diasporic” is confusing. I oppose adopting it for the same reasons that Anita Mannur and Richard Rodriguez oppose adopting “Asian Diasporic”–Jewish American literary study must also be acknowledged on its own terms and in regard to its historical and aesthetic specificities. Similarly, I’m not against “Transnational Jewish American,” but I’m open to other suggestions as well.

I not at all comfortable with the name change. As others have stated Asian American Literature deserves its own category. Asian Diasporic implies something quite different and is usually approached differently. They should be two separate categories.

I’d like to express my support for the comments left here regarding the collapsing of the terms Asian American and Asian Diasporic under the rubric of “American literature.” While “Asian American” may be (read as) one particular, local formation and tradition of “Asian diasporic” literature, this imposes or prioritizes the diaspora model as a way of interpreting this literature. Though the two categories are not necessarily mutually exclusive, the diaspora framework in certain cases may negate the “local” origins of a literary tradition in favor of its orientation towards the historical site of displacement. On the other hand (as others have pointed out), collapsing “Asian diaspora” under American literature suggests that the U.S. is really the only site of diaspora that counts. The term “Asian diaspora” further collapses the fact that there are many diasporas that are formed by intra-Asian migration, and thereby reifies an East/West, Asia/West, or “West and the Rest” comparative model of intercultural contact.

I echo the many concerns voiced here, particularly the troubling lack of transparency and process that resulted in this proposed change without any consultation from the executive committee of the Division. I’m frankly surprised that there hasn’t been a response to this concern, as it was voiced months ago.

Though I am serving on Delegate Assembly as a regional delegate, I will bring this issue up at this year’s meeting.

Chicana/o literary studies have been a stand alone category for years. There are a plethora of issues relevant to comparative Latina/o literary studies quite distinct from issues addressed by Chicana/o literary scholars. Italian American and Jewish American literatures are subsets of U.S. ethnic literatures, but it would not be wise to subsume the two groups under one umbrella term.

Are you really suggesting that Latina/latino and Chicano have as little in common as Italian American and Jewish American literatures? While I support decisions for ethnic groups to organize themselves as they wish, I really don’t think this is an appropriate or convincing analogy, as the linguistic, cultural and literary overlap is obviously much less evident in the latter case.

I believe that there are striking linguistic, cultural and literary differences between Latina/o literatures as a whole and Chicana/o literature specifically. Moreover, I believe that those of us who work in the field recognize those differences and very often speak and write about them. As my other colleagues have noted, it is inappropriate to believe that Chicana/o literary studies is a subset of Latina/o literary studies, just as it would be inappropriate to suggest that Brazilian literature is a subset of Portuguese literature.

Chicana/o is not a “subset” of Latina/o and anyone knowledgable of the field of Latina/o studies knows that adopting the latter term is never at the expense of (or aiming to subsume) the former. The long-standing presence of Chicana/o literature in the MLA should not be erased, and it requires recognition as a body of literature with strong linkages to other Latina/o literatures while distinguished by its geographical, cultural, and historical specificities.

I would agree with Richard Rodriguez above that Chicana/o is not a subset of Latina/o lit. Without re-stating what Rodriguez has said, the new configurations within the MLA, would I hope, contribute to the growth of the fields and recognized trajectories that distinguish Latino/a and Chicano/a rather than conflating them without regard to how practicioners in the fields have defined the field. And ultimately, no Chicano/a is not a subset of Latin/o–completely different histories, methodologies, canons, and texts.

I concur that the distinction between Chicano and Latino Studies is a necessary one. There are groups dedicated to “Cuban and Cuban Diasporic” as well as “Puerto Rican.” The Chicano group ensures a focus on Mexican-American writing that does not have a home elsewhere (The Mexican group under Latin American does not necessarily address US-based writers of Mexican heritage). The Latino group, on the other hand, is a welcome addition to the current set of groups since it would allow for a comparative discussion of these distinct Latino groups and their literature.

There are valid reasons to have a Chicana and Chicano group in the MLA, namely the reality that it is a well developed field with numerous practitioners that at times interact with but do not overlap with the field of Latina/o studies. There are numerous programs in Chicana/o Studies, including PhDs in the field. I welcome the maintenance of a distinct group (similar to the Puerto Rican and Cuban/Cuban-American groups) as well as the creation of a pan-Latina/o group. Ultimately, member interest will determine the number of panels that will be allocated to the Chicana and Chicano group: it may maintain its Division number (of 3 guaranteed sessions) or have less, as people perhaps shift to Latina and Latino. This should be decided by the membership.

I’m currently co-chair of the Committee on the Literatures of the People of Color of the U.S. and Canada, and I strongly support maintaining this group (distinct from Latina and Latino, which is a group as wide and heterogeneous as “Asian American”). Chicana/o should be maintained as a distinct group due to its particular literary, cultural, and political importance in American literature.

While discussion is still open, I want to voice my support for maintaining a group in Chicana and Chicano literature as well as for adding a group in Latina and Latino literature. The institutional formations of these fields are distinct, as are their particular histories. I hope that this new group structure will in fact facilitate more robust exchange between the fields than the former division/discussion group structure.

My comment is similar to Sander Gilman’s on paragraph 57, Jewish American and Jewish Diasporic. Does Italian Diasporic literature pertain to literature written in English by those now living in a country outside Italy, the United States, and other English-speaking countries? The term “disaporic” could refer to literature written by immigrants or long-time residents and citizens of a non-Italian country, but not written either in English or in Italian.

I have to agree with A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff and Sander L. Gilman in questioning these two group names, as well as Asian American and Asian Diasporic. These groups are under “American,” but the “diaspora” in the title suggests that it could include someone of Italian descent in, say, South America writing primarily in Spanish or Portuguese.

I understand that the MLA leadership is trying to account for changes in the field(s), particularly the increase in transnational contexts, but I think that “diaspora” in all three of these groups’ titles raises too many questions and problems, particularly if we’re still working within the general rubric of “American.”

I agree with LaVonne. While we have embraced the terms Italian Diasporic Literature in other venues as a means of making the most of dwindling resources in the academy, it seems to me that the MLA might be inviting literatures beyond the U.S. into this particular group, and thereby limiting the possibilities for focusing on the development of work on Italian American literatures. There is much Italian American literature written in Italian and various Italian dialects, and these have been included in past Discussion Group meetings. The problem lies in the expansion of this group to include literature written in Italian throughout the world. It would seem to me that this is territory shared by both the current Italian American and various Italian Groups. I’m not necessarily against this change, I only want to establish clarification of the new group’s mission before I articulate my position so that this group has a focused purpose.

As a Venezuelan/ American of Italian descent and as a Comparatist, I think the idea of “diasporic” would allow for interesting work to be done that focuses on Italian identities worldwide. That said, I do agree with the comments above that question the implied limitations for discussion on Italian American work. Perhaps the group could take this multilingual diasporic crisis of Italian and Italian American Studies as its first conference topic.

I am not sure what Jewish Diasporic means: since this is an offshoot of Jewish American is it supposed to be Anglophone or is there no intention to limit it thusly. Thus would German-Jewish be here and not under the German Literature (German Jewish, no hyphen) period designations? This is less the case with Jewish-American, Jewish Cultural Studies, Hebrew, Yiddish, Sephardic — but where is Jewish European Literature? Or Jewish Latin American, or Australian,etc, etc. Is this the only Diaspora possible?

Since the other Jewish categories are languages PLUS good old Cultural Studies, I am simply confused. Sure it would be lovely if all incorporated such topics but as you know the old model was if it belonged elsewhere according to the selection committee in any given year it could be excluded.

In all 4 categories of Jewish (#s112-115)–Hebrew, Yiddish, Sephardic, Jewish Cultural Studies–there will be considerable overlap with # 57–Jewish American and Jewish Diasporic. Yiddish could also be a topic in #138– Multilingualism and Heritage Languages, as well as in #s 96 and 97–German. Would Ladino fit into #114 Sephardic, or #101 Iberian, or in #138 Multilingualism and Heritage Languages?
Maybe all these overlaps offer opportunities.

I agree that “Jewish Diasporic” is confusing. I oppose adopting it for the same reasons that Anita Mannur and Richard Rodriguez oppose adopting “Asian Diasporic”––Jewish American literary study must also be acknowledged on its own terms and in regard to its historical and aesthetic specificities. Similarly, I’m not against “Transnational Jewish American,” but I’m open to other suggestions as well.

A Latina and Latino group is desperately needed in the MLA. Organizational challenges have gotten in the way of establishing one before, but numerous formal and informal meetings have been had on this topic, petitions have been circulated, and signatures have been collected. Latina and Latino literature and culture and Latina/o studies are a growing field with numerous publications and employment possibilities. The current configuration of the MLA’s divisions and discussion groups does not foster comparative pan-Latina/o work, in spite of the fact that many of us teach Latina/o courses and publish in this field. This group does not duplicate the Chicana and Chicano group, which focuses on Mexican-American experience.

As I noted in the Chicano group comments, this Latino group is a very welcome addition to the current set of groups since it adds a pan-ethnic category and ensures a home for a comparative discussion of distinct Latino groups and their literature. As was the case with the Chicano group, I’m sure, the creation of this Latino group has been requested by a large group of faculty active in these fields, calling attention to the prior gap in comparative Latino studies at the MLA.

I am currently co-chair of MLA’s Committee on the Literatures of People of Color of the U.S. and Canada. I heartily welcome and applaud the creation of this group. It’s long overdue, and I thank the MLA leadership for trying to address this lacuna.

Addendum: I meant to say “American Indian and Indigenous.” My understanding is that “American Indian” is generally deemed preferable to “Native American,” and we need Indigenous so as to include groups like the Inuit. But as I said above, we need to hear from people in the field.

“American Indian” with Carla Zecher’s addition of Indigenous would seem better. “Native American” was an imposed term that few American Indians that I have met much like. But I would like to hear from them.

Indigenous Studies is listed under “Transdisciplinary Connections” in the proposal. I also agree, and have been advised, that American Indian is widely preferred over Native American, though both are problematic. The problem with indigenous being added to American Indian in this category is that indigenous is a global term, even thought it can refer to regional and national communities. This would explain why the MLA listed indigenous studies under “Transdisciplinary Connections” rather than Amercian Languages, Literatures, and Cultures.

My comment entered this afternoon seems to have disappeared. Like Carla Zecher and others, I favor retaining “American Indian” and adding the term “Indigenous” or North American Indigenous” or “American and Canadian Indigenous.” In the 1970s and 1980s, Native American” was popular among Native and non-Native intellectuals. It was never widely used among Indians themselves. Also, the terms used by the U.S. Census are “American and Native Alaskan.” In the last few years, La there has been criticism of Native American” by such authors as Sherman Alexie (Spokane) and Susan Power (Dakota). Canada has used First Nations and Indigenous in preference to American Indian and Native American.

When the University of Illinois, Chicago, creaated its studies program, the committee, which I chaired, selected “Native American Studies as the program’s title. I would never select this now because too many people define “Native American” as born in the United States. The late Charlton Heston used to say “I am a Native American.”

The division of Arabic into “Classical and Postclassical” and “Modern” looks fine to me. However, to my mind it might be less ambiguous as “Pre-Modern” and “Modern.” Ultimately, any categories are better than no categories!

I certainly appreciate the efforts of the MLA to open spaces of representation for fields and sub-fields that are often immersed in larger configurations. Indeed, classical Arabic, in the context of the MLA, is submerged within Arabic, which tends to be modern.

The problem with parsing two different groups is that, at this point, Arabic studies doesn’t have the critical numbers consistently to insure that one or both groups will have be weak (in quality, number, representation, presence, etc.).

In recent years, the Arabic Division has been very successful in building a vibrant, dynamic, and cutting edge shareholder in the MLA. It has done this through the leadership of scholars of both classical and modern Arabic. Indeed, I fear that dividing the configuration-formally-known-as-Division into small aggregates will undercut that progress. Moreover, I feel that as a unified group classical and modern scholars are thrown together in ways that we can dialogue that might not necessarily be the same as two groups.

We all know that identities, disciplines, and boundaries are socially, historically, and institutionally constructed (yadda yadda yadda). I appreciate the MLA’s attempt to be more inclusive (albeit from top down) and its desire to reorganize boundaries etc.

However, this attempt seems to replicate liberal American white society’s attempt to “open spaces” for minorities and the marginalized, which in doing so only affords them a place at a table in which their (politically and historically constituent, in this case disciplinary) identity is tokenized and diluted.

My advice to the MLA’s leadership would be the same one might give to majoritarian communities who seek to integrate minoritarian communities that were, perhaps, marginalized by the former’s lock on power. That is, perhaps, the MLA would do best to atomize its “whiteness” (its majoritarian culture) while at the same time leave minoritarian configurations (e.g. less taught languages) as blocks, thereby elevating representation and presence because the larger groups self-separated into aggregates putting them on part with minorities.

I certainly appreciate the efforts of the MLA to open spaces of representation for fields and sub-fields that are often immersed in larger configurations. Indeed, classical Arabic, in the context of the MLA, is submerged within Arabic, which tends to be modern.

The problem with parsing two different groups is that, at this point, Arabic studies doesn’t have the critical numbers consistently to insure that one or both groups will have be weak (in quality, number, representation, presence, etc.).

In recent years, the Arabic Division has been very successful in building a vibrant, dynamic, and cutting edge shareholder in the MLA. It has done this through the leadership of scholars of both classical and modern Arabic. Indeed, I fear that dividing the configuration-formally-known-as-Division into small aggregates will undercut that progress. Moreover, I feel that as a unified group classical and modern scholars are thrown together in ways that we can dialogue that might not necessarily be the same as two groups.

We all know that identities, disciplines, and boundaries are socially, historically, and institutionally constructed (yadda yadda yadda). I appreciate the MLA’s attempt to be more inclusive (albeit from top down) and its desire to reorganize boundaries etc.

However, this attempt seems to replicate liberal American white society’s attempt to “open spaces” for minorities and the marginalized, which in doing so only affords them a place at a table in which their (politically and historically constituent, in this case disciplinary) identity is tokenized and diluted.

My advice to the MLA’s leadership would be the same one might give to majoritarian communities who seek to integrate minoritarian communities that were, perhaps, marginalized by the former’s lock on power. That is, perhaps, the MLA would do best to atomize its “whiteness” (its majoritarian culture) while at the same time leave minoritarian configurations (e.g. less taught languages) as blocks, thereby elevating representation and presence because the larger groups self-separated into aggregates putting them on part with minorities.

While I am glad our medievalist colleagues will have a platform to share their research and work, I am uncomfortable with having just two Arabic groups: medieval and a modern Arabic. What happened to Comparative Arabic lit. and culture? where would that group fit? Seeing a rich corpus of works, lit. and culture produced by authors who are Arabs, or have Arabic roots, in a variety world of languages (other than Arabic) continuously marginalized and sidestepped is uncomfortable. Mind you this corpus flourished either as a direct result of colonialism or of migration and exile. Can Comparative or World Arabic lit and culture finally speak? The other outcome of having only two Arabic groups is that this makes Arabic lit. appear as if it exists in isolation of other literatures, cultures, and world events, not conversing and negotiating with them, which better reflects the reality of what happened in the past and what is happening nowadays. Can World and Comparative Arabic lit and culture finally speak? Please!

I’d like to echo Stephen’s and Suha’s comments here. And also to note there appears to be a consensus on the part of active members of the group regarding this point. To divide Arabic into historical categories imposes too arbitrary a division. It is also a division somewhat out of step with the field itself. Arabic scholarship is enriched by transhistorical and transnational discussions. It’s more interesting for us to see how the problems we are engaging transcend time and space. It will be more interesting for audiences as well. Perhaps in the future consensus on this matter will change.

Dear colleagues:
I deeply appreciate the MLA’s efforts to rethink the organization of its divisions and discussion groups.
First, let me say that I support the proposal to dissolve the distinction between “discussion groups” and “divisions” into a new category: “groups.” Symbolically, at least, this change will go some way toward eliminating the intellectual hierarchy that the current distinction implies. And as scholars of language, literature, and other media, we know that symbolic capital is important. Yet words just as surely mystify. Whether material distinctions also will disappear is less sure: I note that the MLA still intends to apportion resources unequally, giving some “groups” one guaranteed session and others two during the proposed transition period. To invoke Orwell, then, some groups will be more equal than others.
That said, I find the proposed “map” of networks—presently organized under the broad categories “Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies,” “Genre and Media Studies,” “Languages, Literatures, and Cultures,” “Language Studies,” “Teaching and the Profession,” and “Transdisciplinary Connections”—out of sync with the MLA’s interest in jettisoning tired intellectual frameworks and in promoting more dynamic, fluid, transversal modes of knowledge-making in research and pedagogy, activism and advocacy. The subdivisions proposed in the “Languages, Literatures, and Cultures” category strike me as not as forward-looking as they could be. Why atomize the world’s languages, literatures, cultures into ever more infinitesimal particles? Why array these in such a way that they appear unrelated? I for one would like to see the “Languages, Literatures, and Cultures” category revised along the transcontinental lines currently envisioned under “Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies,” and perhaps also along transhistorical lines that at once concede and resist current periodizations.
Is there any unit, after all, that is not inherently heterogeneous—for all its apparent self-sameness—and therefore also inherently comparative?
I will cite just two cases in point: “African” and “Arabic.” First, I strongly oppose the proposed subdivision of the current Division on African Literature into “Southern African” and “Sub-Saharan African.” I echo the sentiments of many of the colleagues who already have posted here. The proposed subdivision perpetuates a fundamentally Eurocentric notion, at least as old as Hegel, that Africa “proper” is “sub-Saharan Africa”; it also, as Ato Quayson has noted, reifies the egregious apartheid-era distinction between South Africa and a denigrated African “core.” We would do well to recall the words of the South African writer and ANC activist Mazisi Kunene, who declared (in the pioneering trilingual, Third Worldist journal Afro-Asian Writings, in 1967), “There is a political fallacy which seeks to divide Africa into two segments: Africa, South of the Sahara and Africa, North of the Sahara. […] Arabic literature of North Africa, Nigerian, and Ethiopian literatures are as much an African heritage as Japanese is part of an Asian literary heritage,” and the better-known words of Frantz Fanon, whose Les Damnés de la terre (1961) warned against the desire to divide Africa into an “Afrique noire” and an “Afrique blanche.” I would suggest, then, that the current category “African Literature” be left as is—perhaps amending the present focus on literature be amended to “African Orature, Literature, and Media”—and the number of sessions accorded to the group expanded. The current category holds far more intellectual integrity than the subdivisions proposed, and the capaciousness and productive ambiguity of “African” better serve local, regional, and transregional scholarship on the continent’s oratures, literatures, and media.
Second, while the proposed subdivision of the current Division on Arabic Literature and Culture into “Classical and Postclassical Arabic” and “Modern Arabic” is, on its face, less egregious than the proposed vivisection of Africa, here too the strategy—while well-intentioned and in fact supported by some of my colleagues in the field—unwittingly ends up dividing and conquering a relatively small (if strong) community of established and emerging scholars. Here too I would propose that the MLA retain the category “Arabic Literature and Culture”—perhaps amending the name to “Arabic Literatures, Cultures, and Media,” which might better reflect the plurality of “Arabics” and modes of Arab cultural production that flourish in the world—and expand the number of sessions accorded to the group. As other scholars have pointed out, some of the most exciting work in Arabic literary and cultural studies today challenges the modern (and deeply ideological) theses of “decline” and “renaissance” that often have sequestered the “classical” from the “postclassical,” the “premodern” or (denigrated) “medieval” from the “modern.” To my mind, at least, keeping Arabic “one” would be far better, intellectually and politically, than subdividing it by period or geography, given that so many of us in the field are working now—and many more of us will—to challenge and redefine hermetic periodizations and geographies.

I support the name change from Arthurian Literature to Arthurian. While I recognize that Arthurian is not a language, I believe that it is helpful to include it under Language, Literatures, and Cultures, in its own category, especially given the interest in Arthuriana where literature and culture are concerned. Placing it in Comparative Literature might be too restrictive.

I too agree that Arthurian Studies should be moved to CLCS. It’s extremely odd to see a single field that encompasses many languages hanging out with the language-designated fields. Further encouraging the move is that the only other medieval division in CLCS, titled just “medieval,” is gigantic–ten centuries and global span (could include, for example, richly documented Chinese and Japanese medieval). Plenty of intellectual room for a second medieval division within CLCS. The focus of every paper in every session of CLCS divisions is not comparative: checking old programs, I see CLCS division papers on novels by Dickens and Fielding. So an Arthurian division within CLCS could still include papers on single works and single authors, within the enabling context of recognizing Arthurian’s international reach.

What will happen to the current two groups and committees for “East Asian Lang. and Lit. to 1900” and “East Asian Lang. and Lit. after 1900”? New election? Committee members continuing their service but being assigned to various new groups?

With respect to “Comparative East Asian,” which has been placed under the category Asian: I think a better category to put it under might be “Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies.” My reasoning is that most of the scholars who will be active in the division will be comparatists. Their work may pertain to comparing things within East Asia or between East Asia (or a given national language) and another place/culture/geography. In any event, they would most likely be comparatists.

I agree with Chris Lupke and Matthew Fraleigh – Comparative East Asia should not be isolated in this way. Also, and even more importantly, Japanese, Korean, South Asian, West Asian, etc. should not all be clustered together under “Asian,” when Hungarian, Irish, Nordic, Occitan, Romanian, Scottish, etc. have their own headings. Why not separate headings for Japanese, Korean, South Asian etc.? Particularly since South Asia houses about a quarter of the world’s population and has millennia of cultural production.

I agree with Chris, Matthew and Karen on the location of the Comparative East Asia category, although I wonder if a “Comparative Asian” division might be more apropos?

Karen, I also very much agree that clustering these divisions under the “Asian” subheading makes little sense, esp. if we’re going to separate out China but not South Asia. Also, where’s Southeast Asia? Central Asia?

I am amazed that there are categories for Comparative East Asian, Japanese, Korean, South and West and yet there is still no category for literature from China. I could perhaps understand a category for Comparative East Asian but not at the exclusion of Chinese literature. I, for one, teach a course that focuses on translated works by women from China. My approach to this course is completely different to how I approach Asian American literature or literature of the Chinese diaspora. The term diasporic seems to lessen the importance of studying literature from an original country. It implies looking at literature of peoples who have left their country of origin sometime in the past and settled elsewhere. I understand that this (paragraph 54) is an attempt to be inclusive for those studying the Asian diaspora but it leaves those studying a specific country’s literature lumped into a huge generalization wither under the Asian Diasporic or Comparative East Asian. Come on! When one fourth of the world speaks Chinese don’t you think it is about time that MLA recognizes the importance of literature from China? Keep the comparative category if you must but there are those of us out here who are trying to bring attention to literature from China and would appreciate a venue where we can connect and communicate with each other without being lost in a portmanteau category.

Another way to divide the “Japanese” and “Korean” divisions would be to make one “Pre-Modern Northeast Asian Languages and Literatures” and one “Modern Northeast Asian Languages and Literatures,” or something like that. But I defer to my Japanese and Korean studies colleagues, because I don’t really have a dog in the fight on this one.

I think it is important to preserve the words/languages “Japanese” and “Korean” in the framework as a whole. While I can see the potential for interesting conversations generated by a combined “Northeast Asian” rubric, I think the proposed “Comparative East Asian” group would be the natural place for these to flourish.

This title change, I think, would accurately represent the kind of scholarly work that gets presented in the panels organized by this group. It will also open up space for including South Asian diasporic texts produced in non-Western venues and address the increasing cultural, political, and economic importance of the South Asian diaspora to South Asian countries.

I fully support these two “South Asian” groups, but the fact that we have these two groups here begs the question of why we cannot have similar arrangements for other Asian cultures by both periods and genres. See below.

Should we not have a group for Chinese Performance and Popular Culture?

As for the South Asian Film group, shall we opt for something more general for the sake of coverage? Instead of film (a very specific genre), we might consider performance.

I agree, Alex, that it would make sense to retain/add periodization. This would also drastically increase the number of divisions for Asian langs. and lits, so from that perspective it would be a good thing. However, I wonder if, again, it’s a matter of how many scholars would participate?

It’s silly to add film, new media, and pop culture to this one group. It’s already represented broadly with the film studies, media studies, digital humanities, and pop culture groups under the Genre and Media Studies header.

South Asian film has a long history of its own, particularly in India, but other nations and regions also have long histories that deserve (and have received) serious scholarly and critical consideration (East Asia, Latin America, Egypt, etc.). Taken with the separation of Cinema and the Moving Image from Media Studies above, the consideration of cinema and other media in MLA, whether aligned regionally or not, seems fragmented. Perhaps MLA should consider how its interests in these areas align with or are distinct from the interests of related organizations, such as the Society for Cinema & Media Studies. See the list of SCMS Interest Groups athttp://www.cmstudies.org/?page=scholar_interst_gr for comaprison.

I strongly support having two groups on South Asia as well as having similar groups for other geographical areas. But, in lieu of the above comments, I wonder if South Asian Cultural Studies, similar to Jewish Cultural Studies might work better.

To chime in with what others have said above: where is Central Asia? It appears to be wholly unrepresented in the entire group structure laid out in this proposal.

A lot of Russianists/Slavists are now doing serious work on Central Asian langs and lits and also on Caucasian langs and lits. We need one or two categories that can accommodate this, either by incorporating them into the Russian” category and renaming that category accordingly (Russian and Eurasian? Russian and former Soviet?) or by giving them a groups or groups of their own (Caucasian and Central Asian? Two separate groups, one for Caucasian and one for Central Asian?).

I’m not sure I understand the reason for the change from “Canadian Literature in English” to “Canadian.” If for no other reason than Québecois literature that appears in French, having only a single “Canadian” category (that I assume is both Francophone & Anglophone Canadian literature?) seems problematic.

I would suggest three categories under Canadian: 1) Anglophone; 2) Francophone; 3) First Nations (in any language).

Or is Québecois literature in French meant to fall under the “Francophone” group within French?

I’m writing as the current Chair of the Canadian Literature in English Discussion Group Executive Committee (the current name of the Discussion Group). The executive committee decided to suggest a new name for the group. Our reasoning was that “Canadian Literature in English” seemed to exclude a range of potential other literatures (including Quebecois literature written in French). The goal was to remove the “in English” so as to be less restrictive. To my group’s knowledge (we have all only assumed our role on the executive committee over the past four years or less and there is no significant past institutional memory among us), there was never a “Canadian Literature in French” discussion group. If specialists in that field would like to create one or other variations of “Canadian Literature” discussion groups, we welcome that. In the interim, as the “Canadian Literature in English” discussion group is currently the only existing discussion group representing Canada, we thought that it was best to frame the group as expansively as possible so as to enable diverse participation.

The name that our group proposed, however, is not reflected here. We recommended “Literatures and Cultural Studies in Canada.” Although we recognized that the phrasing was a bit long and awkward, it was important to us to make the shift from the potentially proprietary “Canadian Literature” to “Literatures in Canada” due to the problems of subsuming First Nations, Inuit, and Metis writing under the category of “Canadian” (and the effacement of these nations’ sovereignty such a subsumption might entail).

This may come under the heading of “if it’s not broken . . .” but I could imagine a dynamic group under the heading Celtic and Celtic Diaspora Studies. Cf the new hypothesis by Robb about the pre-Roman Celtic patterns for European life, etc., as these now seem to have offered an alternative and highly sophisticated mode of a non-imperial scattered tribal polis.

I think this executive committee would be better titled something like “Chinese to the Ming” (in keeping with the structure of other executive committees that are chronological, for example, “German to 1700.”) Or, to make it absolutely clear (though this would forfeit the consistency with other executive committees), one could say “Chinese up until Ming” or even “Early and Medieval Chinese.”

I agree with Christopher Lupke. In my experience, when scholars talk about “Early Modern China,” they often mean the Ming, or at least include the Ming within their definition, so the proposed titles create confusion.

I support the three groups for Chinese literary and cultural studies (pre- and early modern; Ming / Qing; and Republican and Communist). However, why stop there? It seems arbitrary. By “Republican and Communist” presumably you mean early the mid-twentieth century and with reference to the literary production in mainland China only. The Chinese diaspora, Hong Kong and Taiwan are both important sites of cultural production and should not be neglected if you are going to have multiple groups for Chinese literature. I suggest Sinphone as a fourth group to capture what is being left out. After all, you have Lusophone, Dutchophone, Francophone and so on.

I too support the formation of three executive committees for Chinese. I am not fond of the proposed name for this one. I would suggest something like “Modern and Contemporary Chinese.” First of all, specialists will know what “Republican” means in this context, but others likely won’t. This could lead to some serious confusion. Second, “Communist Chinese” is simply too prone to misinterpretation. In many cases, it simply would not fit. What about Chinese authors during the Communist era who are not communists? What about the contemporary situation in which communism as an economic theory has essentially be repudiated in China in favor of a mixed, market based economy? Third, Alex Huang is correct. The focus solely on “Republican” and “Communist,” even if one is comfortable with those words, restricts the discussion to mainland China to the exclusion of all other Chinese literatures and cultures. It would be better to leave the borders as loosely defined as possible. Under “Modern and Contemporary Chinese,” inclusion of Hong Kong, Taiwan, even overseas authors would fit.

As to the suggestion Alex makes that a fourth one be created for Sinophone, I think that is a good idea but there is a caveat. I think the way things are going in our field it will certainly be necessary at some point. If, however, the committee and the membership feel that Chinese is getting too much out of the current deal (we are sensitive to that argument, not just in the MLA but in our own academic institutions where, in some cases, resentment has built up over the expansion of Chinese), then another idea would be for now to create a Discussion Group called “Sinophone Studies.” I’m confident that will attract scholars. It will be quickly successful. After a few years, it could expand into a full-fledged division.

I just read the FAQ and now understand that the idea is to eliminate the distinction between divisions and discussion groups, awarding a single session to each group. In this case, then I have to agree more readily with Alex Huang that there needs to be a Sinophone group too.

“Every group will be guaranteed at least one session at every convention. Membership numbers—though not the size of audiences—will determine the number of additional guaranteed sessions a group receives. As in the present structure, groups will normally have either one or two guaranteed sessions and will be able to compete for more.”

I think that’s a very good idea — a good way to square the circle. I support the idea of giving everyone a minimum one session as a bedrock and then having them earn one or two more based on the activity of the group.

I am delighted to see the creation of three groups for Chinese literary and cultural studies. I share the concerns Christopher Lupke and others have voiced about the precise terminology for the three periods (especially for the first and third categories) but I think his recommendations for the names would be clear solutions. A separate issue that I think merits consideration, however, is the location of “Chinese” as a category separate from “Asian.” I think it makes more sense to locate these three Chinese Language, Literature, and Culture groups with the other groups now gathered by the “Asian” heading. Currently, the “Asian” heading encompasses West Asia, Japan, Korea, and South Asia while excluding China – which is a formulation of “Asia” that I think is unfamiliar to many Asianists. An “Asian” category encompassing all of Asia seems preferable to me – but if some sort of division of “Asian” is indeed necessary, perhaps an “East Asia” (China, Japan, Korea), “West Asia” and “South Asia” formulation would better reflect both literary/cultural history and how our sub-disciplines currently collaborate with one another.

I strongly agree with Matthew Fraleigh in his suggestion that “Chinese” be included in the category “Asian” (or better yet “East Asian”) along with “Japan” and “Korea.” Here at the University of Illinois, every year EALC offers a “Masterpieces of East Asian Literature” gateway course to a large class made up primarily of first and second year students. It makes good sense to teach these three literary traditions together given their common cultural roots and different adaptations of a set of core philosophies and texts.

Beyond making good pedagogical and disciplinary sense, I think there is also the benefit of professional solidarity and (I hope) increased political clout in MLA by sticking together under an “East Asian” umbrella. I agree with one of Christopher Lupke’s earlier comments that there is sometimes resentment among European language faculty at the expansion of Chinese curriculum and students at some institutions. One way to counteract this somewhat irrational fear would be to stand together and advocate for each other. By creating “Chinese” as an entirely independent category outside of “Asian” or even “East Asian” might we not be isolating ourselves and exposing ourselves to the sort of anti-China paranoia that unfortunately is current in academia today. Lastly, I know that AAS may have a category for “Northeast Asia,” but it seems that there are stronger pedagogical and political arguments for standing with “Japan” and “Korea” under the “East Asia” heading. That is my two cents.

I too am glad to see the three sub-sections within the “Chinese” heading and support Christopher Lupke’s suggestion that “Modern and Contemporary Chinese” is a more encompassing and less problematic heading than “Republican and Communist.”

I agree that “Modern and Contemporary” is much better than “Republican and Communist”, both because of the arguments of inclusivity suggested by Alex Huang, and because “Republican and Communist” may have unwarranted implications for the political sympathies of individual writers. I’d support Alex Huang’s suggestion of a Sinophone group, but if there is a need to keep the number of Chinese groups to three, “Modern and Contemporary Chinese” at least suggests a space where Sinophone cultural production would be a natural subject of discussion.

I’ve been reading through the comments subsequent to my earlier ones, and they are all good. So, one issue is how to house our various new groups. I think we’ve seen consensus from the Asianists that the Comparative East Asian should be under the Comparative rubric. Also, I’m sensing that people feel “Asian” is too broad, even as an overall rubric. Since that’s about half (or more) of the world’s population, I think it makes sense that we break down that overall category a little further. As Matthew and Benjamin have astutely noted, we should not cut China off from other East Asian entities, such as Japan and Korea. Rather, we should group all those together under one larger rubric called “East Asian.” South Asian and West Asian do not fit with us. Some people might engage in comparative studies of these places, but very very few.

So, what we could have is an “East Asian” rubric under which the Japanese, Korean, and the 3 Chinese groups are housed. Then, we could move the Comparative East Asian to the Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies rubric.

I agree with you Chris – are you suggesting though that we have “China,” “Japan,” and “Korea” divisions under the larger “East Asia” heading? Not a bad idea, but if that’s the case, we would do well to support the establishment of separate South Asian and West Asian regional umbrellas (to be subdivided in a similar regional/national/linguistic fashion? Or chronologically?).

I also support a category of Modern and Contemporary China rather than Republican and Communist. In my class I use some of the significant writers who were actually writing under the Qing Dynasty to transition my students into more modern 20th century writers. I am also concerned that the past categories seem to leave out China. As translations and accessibility to a greater body of Chinese literature becomes available, it is worth considering China as a separate category and for comparative purposes include China under East Asian. There is certainly sufficient material for comparative studies that solely focus on Chinese literature whether that is limited geographically or the greater diaspora.

I fully support the “Modern and Contemporary Chinese” revision to the “Republican and Communist” category. As for the Sinophone debate, I understand that it may be too soon to ask for a separate category, as it was, I’m sure, a long time coming and a hard-fought battle just to get this expansion of discussion groups for Chinese literature. I certainly believe we should continue to appeal for a distinct Sinophone category, perhaps as the numbers of people working in this new field continue to grow. I believe that right now those working in Sinophone literature could lend their voices in many of the expanded categories (not simply under the “Chinese” rubric) in Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies and elsewhere.

Not at all my field except for occasional teaching of various texts in translation, but from the periphery I can only say that it seems absurd to name a Group “Republican and Communist Chinese” — it would be like calling study of fin-de-siecle Vienna by the name Franz-Josef Studies or US culture of the 60’s “Nixonian”

To judge from Google hits, the term Dutchophone is sparsely used. What is wrong with the former term Netherlandic? It refers primarily to the language and so serves the same semantic purpose as the -phone composites, and it is the term used in the names of the relevant North American professional associations.

Would this group allow for studies in Afrikaans literature, as well as in Dutch and other Creole languages such as Papiamento and Sranan Tongo? How about Frisian? If so, the term Dutchophone seems limited as it would not necessarily include these linguistic groupings. A group for the 21st century would at th very least allow for the written and oral literature from Namibia and South Africa produced in Afrikaans.

Might it not be possible to combine Old and Middle English in one group? Is it a good idea to isolating what has become a dangerously marginalized discipline? Wouldn’t a combined group reinforce the continuoity of English — even the drama of the pre- and post-conquest linguistic evolution, while also providing safety in numbers for the OE group?

Stephen, there is certainly an argument to be made that the separation of OE and ME reinforces the marginalization of OE and perpetuates an artificial boundary between periods where cross-boundary study is essential (sexuality studies is one example; history of the book and history of the language are obvious others, as you say). But it’s vitally important that medieval English keeps its 3 divisions, at least for now. It’s been something of a battle to persuade MLA to keep the 3 divisions. I’d be concerned if we gave any ground that allowed this to be reduced to 2. But certainly we should be talking about ways of reconfiguring the period boundaries.

I strongly agree that Old English should not be fused into one division with later medieval English. It would not be possible to represent the best research in eight centuries of insular literature through just three sessions per year. The vitality of new work in Old English studies is better protected by committing three annual sessions to this vital field of research.

Stephen, in fact there is still a Chaucer group. If members agreed to collapse Chaucer into Middle English then medievalists in English studies would lose one of the 3 groups that we have, and none of us would want to see a reduction in our representation. So whatever the merits of having Chaucer included in Middle English, for now it’s a political decision to retain two separate groups — Chaucer and Middle English. And it’s very important that we retain Old English as well as a separate group.

Is it weird that Chaucer and Shakespeare are the only individual authors singled out as their own fields of study in all of global modern languages? Perhaps the membership numbers support it, though I don’t see a flood of relieved Chaucerians and Shakespeareans commenting.

Okay, I’ll say it: I am one of the members who is relieved that Chaucer will retain its own group. Many of us would still identify ourselves as Chaucerians (not that that is all we are). MLA’s retaining this group could be useful ammunition in departments that are thinking of phasing out a separate course on Chaucer. Although I can see how it might appear anomalous that only Chaucer and Shakespeare have their own groups, this is a matter of institution-historical contingencies that I think still play a role in the 21st-cent. academy. More gets published on Chaucer than on any other Middle English author by far, and he is more frequently taught.

I second James Goldstein. Many Chaucerians and medievalists have lobbied MLA vigorously to retain Chaucer as a separate group. I repeat what I said above in my comments on paragraph 77: If members agreed to collapse Chaucer into Middle English then medievalists in English studies would lose one of the 3 groups that we have, and none of us would want to see a reduction in our representation. So whatever the merits of having Chaucer included in Middle English, for now it’s a political decision to retain two separate groups — Chaucer and Middle English. And it’s very important that we retain Old English as well as a separate group.

(Apologies for the abbreviated previous post! I’m not sure what happened to it as I was composing it.) I too will add to the flood of relieved Chaucerians commending the MLA draft committee for retaining Chaucer as a separate group. Pointing to the historical situations of institutions of higher education is indeed important: Chaucer’s influence in the history of English literature has never waned, and it remains essential to emphasize that if the history of English literature is to be retained as one of the factors among many others that belongs to the university study of English. In fact, there are a large number of stand-alone courses on Chaucer at universities that justify the inclusion of a Chaucer section in the group structure of the MLA.

It is encouraging to see that Chaucer remains a separate group. Anyone who has studied Chaucer (or Shakespeare for that matter) outside of an introductory or survey course realizes his importance to literature in English. Chaucer remains an important figure for medievalists working in English language literature because his works, in many ways, are the culmination of poetic genres and experimentation in Middle English. Indeed, Chaucer should be an important figure for all scholars of English language literature for the same reason. As a profession, we must protect our history lest we risk our future, and preserving Chaucer and Shakespeare as separate groups is the most visible way of doing so.

I would only add that, in addition to reflecting institutional and historical practice, the retention of a separate Chaucer group also recognizes that many non-academics know the Middle Ages exclusively though Chaucer. Often, when I tell people that I’m a medievalist, they fondly recite the first eighteen lines of the General Prologue. For that moment, a voice over seven hundred years old speaks again to those who consider themselves modern.

This is a great improvement over the earlier “Literature excluding Shakespeare.” Because many topics (and literary careers) span the 16th and 17th centuries, I prefer the coherence of “British Early Modern.”

I understand Professor Lupton’s point about topics and literary careers spanning the 16th and 17th centuries. On the other hand, the folding of the (renamed) English Renaissance and 17th-c English Literature into British Early Modern would halve the panels currently going to early-modern non-Shakespearean. It would also bundle together literary periods farther apart than, e.g., Victorian and Late 19th- and Early 20th-C-British (or Transatlantic).

The other problem with the “early modern” designation, of course, is that it imposes a decision on the debate concerning the labelling of this period. “Early modern” has been in use for some time, but it implies a certain teleology, that the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are best understood as looking forward to modernity (however defined). Apart from other considerations, this ignores one of the most active areas of recent scholarship, which seeks to reconnect the sixteenth century with what came before, re-examining the boundaries of the early early modern and the late medieval, if you like. These are complex matters, but significant ones, and they argue against lumping the two centuries together.

I agree with Hannibal Hamlin: while seemingly arbitrary, the 16th/17th c. designation has the advantage of being value-neutral (consider how there is no discussion of renaming the “20th/21st century British” category).

I do to! Nice and pithy. And although I understand the reservations to not link group names to the job market, I have to wonder how many scholars might end up teaching in both centuries. (I know, god forbid we should do anything about teaching at MLA, but….)

I would like to propose “British Renaissance and Early Modern” instead of “British Early Modern.” “Renaissance” remains an important field orientation, as Lisa and Hannibal point out. I agree that Renaissance captures the dialogue with the Middle Ages; it also puts the classical revival more fully center, which is maybe a good thing. “Renaissance” also relates more directly to the sixteenth century, while “Early Modern” more aptly describes the seventeenth century, so having both terms in the division title acknowledges the complexity and internal rhythms of the period while not preventing us from having panels on themes that cross the two centuries.

Off line, another colleague has indicated that in going with this new designation, we are losing a division. The current line up is:

Literature of the English Renaissance, Excluding Shakespeare
17th Century English Literature
Shakespeare

If I am understanding the proposal correctly, we would be going from three divisions to two. I am not thrilled about this, but I do think that “Shakespeare” and “British Renaissance and Early Modern” describe teaching and scholarship in the field at present, including the job market. There is not a single job listed as “sixteenth century” or “seventeenth century,” and I don’t think any departments are hiring specialists in just one century any more.

I am not sure we should use the job market as a measure of a scholarly group. There is in fact a 17th century listing, but given budget constraints, departments are crafting fairly broad ads to fill multiple gaps…so we find there: “Early English Literature (1350-1600)” “16th-18th c. British Lit” and “British Literature before 1900.” These may indeed reflect the scholarship that some people do, but I think they are more accurate measures of teaching needs and curricular issues in a time of austerity.

(But this is basically in line with Julia’s point anyway when she notes that departments don’t hire in a single century).

I like the way centuries are generally neutral and don’t require us to rehash debates over renaissance or early modern, so I would be ok with 16th & 17th century British Literature and find it slightly less unwieldy and ambiguous than “British Renaissance and Early Modern.”

While Renaissance may usefully draw connections with the Middle Ages, I’m not sure it’s a particularly positive way of describing the relationship, or that Medievalists would uniformly appreciate it.

Like Julia and her offline Colleague, I worry a bit about losing a division, but my own work spans both centuries, so I would hope others that focus on one or the other more might post their feelings about it…

Overall, losing the “excluding Shakespeare” seems like a good idea and I’m not really averse to anything that’s being suggested…

As a medievalist, I appreciate the awareness that the term Renaissance is a vexed one for us! I would love some designation that made explicit space for medieval-to-early-modern work, but I realize that that would involve expansion, which is not in the cards for either medieval or renaissance/early modern. I certainly take the point that British Ren/EM as a title for the group avoids an unnecessarily sharp divide between centuries, but insofar as 16th-century is the closest we might get to a designation making room for medievalists and early modernists working across the boundary (as Hannibal Hamlin notes above), I’d be interested in having that retained.

I share the reservations others have voiced about the practical consequences of collapsing three divisions into two. What will that mean about the number of sessions available at MLA for 16th and 17th century English literature?

I’m far more concerned about such practical consequences than about how the name game sorts itself out. Of course it matters what we call ourselves–different labels have very different implications, as Hannibal and others have observed. But no one division name will be unobjectionable, finally, on one ground or another. And we could hardly do worse than “excluding Shakespeare”!

I share the reservations others have voiced about the practical consequences of collapsing three divisions into two. What will that mean about the number of sessions available at MLA for 16th and 17th century English literature? I’m far more concerned about such practical consequences than about how the name game sorts itself out.

Of course it matters what we call ourselves–different labels have very different implications, as Hannibal and others have observed. But no one division name will be unobjectionable, finally, on one ground or another. And we could hardly do worse than “excluding Shakespeare”!

I would prefer to keep three divisions. In my view the MLA division (or group) structure shouldn’t follow the trends of the job market but should maintain the specificity of these fields as we currently construct them.

While I can see the merits of all the points raised so far, I agree most strongly with Stephen, Hannibal, and David: it would be much better to make sure we don’t lose sessions because of a name change. “16th-Century British” and “17th-Century British,” while not idea in some senses, are nonetheless fairly neutral with regard to other complex issues, including the connotations of both “Renaissance” and “Early Modern.”

All in all, I agree with Sean. Century designations present their own special problems, but at least they don’t insist on implying a kind of periodic coherence. That said, the term “Restoration” does imply a periodization based in politics, so we’ve mixed two regimens—centuries and political formations. Do we want to do that?

In any case we should NOT be contracting the number of English lit groups in this period.

While I understand that people are concerned about losing guaranteed slots in the convention, I do not think that separate categories of 16th century and 17th century reflects the scholarship many of us do. If you work on early modern drama, which century do you work in? Like Julia, I think one group most accurately reflects the nature of our field. I’d vote for calling it British Renaissance/Early Modern, akin to the proposed name change in the comments at paragraph 15.

Tough call. What we used to call, more or less comfortably, the English Renaissance has always generated a pretty extraordinary body of work. I’m less fussed about what we call these sessions than about losing an opportunity for good scholars to get work out in front of their peers at the convention. I wouldn’t want to see us tidy up the nomenclature only to go from three sessions to two. So while I take Julia’s point and want to agree with it, my own sense of the issue falls in line with Roland’s.

I am also in favor of maintaining three groups, whatever their titles might be. And I agree that current trends in the job market should not determine MLA session designations: an increasing number of postings include both medieval and early modern–and at least one asks for Shakespeare/early modern, with secondary expertise in 18C or modern/postmodern. I am strongly in favor of anything MLA can do to resist this aspect of our constricted job market, and I think it is at least symbolically important to recognize that the depth and range of work in our period necessitates three distinct groups. I’m not terribly concerned about the 16C British and 17C British designations limiting work that crosses the two centuries, since my own job was listed as 17C, but my research and teaching span 16/17C. Arguably the same could be true if we maintained both groups, even with century-specific titles.

“British Renaissance and Early Modern” strikes me as the most useful designation. I, too, hate to lose the additional panels we get when we organize our field under three rubrics. On the other hand, we’re pretty fortunate to be one of the few fields to get a separate division for a single author (Shakespeare). Other rich and diverse fields (Victorian, for example) don’t get to organize additional panels under the auspices of, say, a “Dickens” division. It’s true, of course, that our period, comprising two centuries, is longer than the Victorian period, but since the vast majority of us work on material produced between about 1550 and about 1680, the difference isn’t as great as it might at first seem. I’m interested in hearing other points of view—I could certainly change my mind—but for now “British Renaissance and Early Modern” makes sense to me and seems like a worthy compromise given the enormity (and importance) of the larger undertaking.

I agree with those who are advocating to retain three groups instead of collapsing them to two for the reasons already expressed. If 79 and 80 are merged, I agree with those who suggest British Renaissance/Early Modern as the name.

I also agree that we should keep three groups, if possible, and that using century designations is more neutral than Renaissance or early modern. There is so much cultural distance between, say, the 1520s and the 1620s that I think it is important that both centuries be represented separately.

To the contrary, there is “so much cultural distance between” the early 1600s and the distinct period called the Restoration that I don’t see how it could possibly be “neutral” to have a period called “The 17th Century”…as dozens upon dozens of the people whose research pertains to the Restoration have attested to under paragraph #82.

For the reason of keeping two rich areas of scholarship as open to representation at the MLA convention as possible I would propose retaining two divisions, one each, for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. I see the advantages that have been mentioned with regard to matters that cross the 1600 divide. Nonetheless, and since I presume one division for the 16th and 17th centuries will mean fewer sessions, we should not abandon a division per century. A single Renaissance/early modern division with the same number of sessions as enjoyed currently by both of the current divisions would be another matter.

As for accurate names (see Rivka Swenson’s comment above), ‘The 17th century to 1660’ would be a solution.

I second Rivka Swenson’s and Nigel Smith’s comments here. I don’t think 17c or 18c scholars mind a change in nomenclature, as long as the number of available sessions or slots remains the same. A 17c to 1660 panel would be fine, because it would enable Restoration scholars to address one another at the face to face panels, as indeed they would do when they publish and read one another’s scholarship.

The specific dynastic labels Professor Luxon is floating suggest (to my mind) a particular lens. Although I don’t want to go to the wall for the traditional BC/AD [BCE/CE?] dating system, the labels 16th-Century and 17th-Century seem to invite a broader range of discussions.

The Officers and Executive Committees of the undersigned MLA Divisions and Affiliated Organizations understand the need to revisit and modify the existing array of divisions and groups, particularly in the light of the rich and increasingly diverse array of literatures being taught in our universities and colleges. We wholeheartedly encourage the MLA to foster growth in emerging fields of literature, and expect the annual convention to represent the leading edge of scholarship challenging traditional boundaries, cultural, temporal, and geographical. Space must opened up for literatures currently underrepresented (e.g., Chinese and Arabic literatures).

The revisions currently proposed, however, simply do not live up to their stated goals. If the current divisions represent the state of the profession in 1974, the proposed changes represent the state of the profession in 1984. This is especially true of proposed revisions in American literature, which reaffirm a “mainstream” national tradition but, like the empire on which such a tradition is premised, assigns a few colonial outposts of minority literatures to its periphery. There has been no collapsing of fields in that imagined mainstream. Only one of the proposed American groups explicitly encourages transatlantic scholarship. As comments in the MLA Commons have pointed out, “Native American” is not the preferred term in American Indian Studies, which should also be expanded to include indigenous studies. Latina and Latino literatures are alarmingly considered a subfield of American literature. The American groups do not reflect the third principle of the reorganization, “to minimize hierarchies and exclusions among fields.” A reorganization of MLA groups representing the current state of scholarship would be considerably less reactionary in its handling of literatures of the Americas.

We would propose a more thorough collapsing of hierarchies. The primary headings under “Languages, Literatures, and Cultures” could be temporal rather than geographic, in a way that might truly live up to the fourth principle of revision: “to lessen the divide between English and the foreign languages.” The rubrics “American” and “English” are already well out of date. A rubric such as “1500-1700” could gather groups from various world traditions, and provide space for generating dialogue.

In the absence of a major reworking of the current proposal, we would strongly urge the MLA to revisit the group structure in early modern British literatures. We are concerned that in one instantiation of the current proposal, all of the tightening in British literature comes in the early modern period, broadly conceived, i.e., in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. One possibility envisaged is the contraction of four divisions into two, in the form of a call for combining the current “Literature of the English Renaissance” and “17th-Century English Literature” divisions into a new “Early Modern British” division (or group), and in a call for the current “Restoration and Early-18th-Century English Literature” and the “Late-18th-Century English Literature” divisions into a new “Long 18th Century” division (or group).

This proposal halves the divisions currently going to British literature (excluding Shakespeare) from thesixteenth through eighteenth centuries, and it bundles literary periods very unevenly—the period from Wyatt and Surrey to Milton would be combined; contrast that sweeping elision with the group “Victorian and Late 19th- and Early 20th-C-British (or Transatlantic).” The combination will inevitably lead to fewer panels at the annual convention, isolating a significant portion of the MLA membership.

If contraction in the English literature divisions is inevitable and even welcome given current disproportions among national literatures, we would like to propose a more even distribution of that contraction. If English literature is to lose two divisions, it is not obvious why all the compression should come between the medieval and Romantic periods. One compromise would be to look for a possible combination of divisions either in medieval or Romantic to the present and to collapse the current four early modern divisions (excluding Shakespeare) into three: sixteenth century, seventeenth century (including Restoration), and eighteenth century. Any model for dividing periods will be artificial, tending to mask continuities and exaggerate differences. We would argue that the very visibility of the arbitrariness of dividing by centuries paradoxically becomes a strength.

We recognize the difficulty and the necessity of the task that the MLA executive has undertaken, and we applaud the principles driving revision. None of those principles, however, justifies the disproportions of the current proposal. Should four divisions spanning the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries become two groups, those who study the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries will be harmed more than anyone in the profession. If there is no truly rigorous updating of the proposed group structure, we strongly recommend that these three centuries of complex and multifaceted cultural history have four devoted groups.
This letter is endorsed by the Officers and Executive Committees of the following MLA Divisions and Affiliated Organizations:

The Division on Literature of the English Renaissance, Excluding Shakespeare

The Division on Seventeenth-Century English Literature

The Division on Division Restoration and Early-18th-Century English Literature

That letter was not “endorsed” by the Executive Committee for the Restoration and Early Eighteenth Century. Indeed, the letter goes against the letter written by the Exec Committee, as well as against the individual letters posted here on the Commons by dozens of colleagues (including the individual letters written by various officers of the Exec Comm).

Clearly, the dozens of letters posted on this site over the past months attest to what appears to be a unanimous desire to preserve, or strengthen, the Restoration as the defined period of study that in fact it IS.

I don’t know if the other division committees and society committees whose names have been signed to this letter as endorsers did indeed endorse the letter, but I know that the Exec Comm for the Restoration and Early C18 did not.

Therefore, I echo my colleague Wolfram Schmidgen (under paragraph 82) in asking that you kindly print an unequivocal retraction as soon as possible–the Commons closes tomorrow, so it truly is important that you issue your correction immediately!

Thank you.

(I would add, too, that the letter, also goes against the petition/open letter, drafted and circulated by Jonathan Kramnick, Deidre Lynch, Danielle Spratt, and me, signed by some 291 of the colleagues whose work is actually represented by the Division for the Restoration & Early Eighteenth Century.)

–RS (Delegate for the Exec Comm for the Division on the Restoration and Early C18)

N.B.: my statement that the letter goes against “the letter written by the Exec Committee, as well as against the individual letters posted here on the Commons by dozens of colleagues” pertains to the 75 comments under paragraph 82 (“Restoration and Early 18th-C British OR The Long 18th Century”).

Rivka, allow me to offer my personal apology. As Secretary for the Milton Society, I (and not Steve) was in contact with the chair of your Division. Owing to some miscommunication, I was under the impression that your Exec Comm had agreed to the letter, which I now realize was not the case. Apologies for any confusion that this has caused and for my role in this mixup. As Steve rightly notes, the Division on Restoration and Early-18th-Century English Literature has not endorsed the letter of Nov 16.

A couple of weeks ago Bill Warner, who is currently chairing the Division for Late Eighteenth-Century English Literature, shared a version of the letter that you’ve posted above with the executive of that Division. In that letter, you concluded by proposing that the current divisional structure be retained. It’s not at all clear to any of us WHY the Milton Society is now advocating for a structure that sacrifices the distinctiveness of the Restoration and that overall will fail to do justice to the robustness and diversity of scholarship on eighteenth-century British literature. I hope that this is just a mistake and that you’ll revise your proposal to return it the version which you showed to us earlier this month.

At any rate, the huge issue here has to do with the representativeness of the MLA. Since only ONE scholar among the dozens who have commented in this forum on the MLA proposal actually supports the merging of the eighteenth-century divisions into a single division (and the submerging altogether of the Restoration), it really baffles belief that either the Milton Society or the MLA itself would believe it to be a good idea to go ahead with this proposal!

Ken and Stephen, I tried to reply to this, but now I’m not sure if it did (iPad and Commons don’t work well together). Thanks for posting here as well as on the other relevant paragraphs–understood! –Rivka

Bill, the Division on Late 18th Century Literature is NOT listed as a signatory on the above letter. The confusion stems from the fact that the earlier draft that we circulated did not become the version posted here.

For the reason of keeping two rich areas of scholarship as open to representation at the MLA convention as possible I would propose retaining two divisions, one each, for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. I see the advantages that have been mentioned with regard to matters that cross the 1600 divide. Nonetheless, and since I presume one division for the 16th and 17th centuries will mean fewer sessions, we should not abandon a division per century. A single Renaissance/early modern division with the same number of sessions as enjoyed currently by both of the current divisions would be another matter.

It’s extremely worrisome that the Restoration could be collapsed into a “17th-Century British” group (or a “Long 18th Century” group, for that matter). The Restoration was a unique period and its political reality had consequences for women (who worked as professional writers and actresses for the first time) and for those marginalized for their religious or political beliefs. It is also a period that lends itself to rich historical revisionism in the analysis of Anglican-Roman Catholic relations in England. These two very historically specific phenomena (women’s professional work in literature and theater and the politicized discourse of religious toleration after the Civil Wars) have implications for the study of feminism, female professional authorship, and the marginalization of Roman Catholics and Dissenters (and non-Christians) in the service of stabilizing England’s national identity. By collapsing the representation of Restoration studies wouldn’t we not only be doing a disservice to the scholars who focus on these areas but also be failing to acknowledge the ongoing discoveries that revisionary scholarship has unearthed about how these historical developments occurred and their consequences for the eighteenth century and beyond?

The executive committee of the Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Division thanks Steve Fallon and Ken Hiltner for correcting the erroneous listing of the committee as a signatory for Fallon’s letter above. To be clear, we do not support a proposal that would essentially subsume the Restoration, a distinct teaching and research field in and of itself, one which extends solidly into the eighteenth century, into a larger category classified as “The Seventeenth Century.” As has been made evident by the committee’s initial comments to the MLA working group and by the subsequent comments of individual committee members to this discussion board, we do not support the changes proposed by the MLA nor do we support those laid out in the letter above.

As a member of the Executive Committee of the Division on Late 18th century British Literature, I received a draft of a letter from the Milton Society that began the way you letter above begins, Stephen, but which did NOT recommend the retention of the 17th century *including* the Restoration. In fact, that letter ended by recommending the retention of the original four divisions: 16th c., 17th c., Restoration and Early 18th c., and Late 18th c. Why the change? Isn’t it possible for your constituency to support the needs of our constituency as well? I have no problem endorsing a bid to retain the three divisions allotted your period. But if *our* period is to be the casualty–that I cannot accept. I propose that you revise your recommendation along the lines suggested by Nigel Smith in a earlier post: 17th c. (excluding Restoration). Otherwise, the Eighteenth-Century alone stands to lose half of its panels.

Once again, I second Rivka Swenson’s sentiment here, and am happy to see the Milton Society’s correction about the sentiments of 18c scholars about the absorption of Restoration studies into some other field. This is an overwhelmingly unpopular view among 18c scholars like myself, who feel that it overrides existing scholarship and scholarly communities for very little gain besides downsizing. There is plenty of evidence for the opposition to this move available at par. 82.

I hope in the future the MLA will conduct this process with more transparency and broader input from the affected scholars than it has thus far.

Along with Rivka, Dave, Catherine, Samara, Sandra, and so many others who have taken time to comment on multiple versions of the draft proposal in multiple formats, as a member of the late 18thC executive committee, and as the current editor of the journal Restoration, I want to say once again that I thoroughly oppose collapse of the Restoration into a 17thC division. Furthermore, I oppose the attempt to shrink the representation in our field and in the British fields before 1900. The fact that so many have taken time to protest this move in so many different venues will, I hope, persuade the MLA that little is to be gained and much is to be lost (most significantly, panels at the MLA and representation within it) if this change happens. While I find much of the process behind this proposed change as lacking in transparency, it is abundantly clear that scholars in the Restoration and 18thC see this as a very bad idea.

As current Vice President of the Milton Society of America, I will try to offer some explanation of our letter on division reorganization to our colleagues studying the Restoration and early eighteenth century. Though our initial reaction was shock and dismay at the reduction of divisions in early modern studies, many of us upon further reflection were sympathetic to the aims governing restructuring: to create space for literary traditions underrepresented under the old structure, and to collapse hierarchies between English and other modern languages. We were somewhat torn between our obligations as officers of the Milton society, and our commitments, intellectual and professional, to MLA’s unique role in providing a forum for scholarship in all modern languages.
For that reason, we opted not to clutter the MLA Commons with histrionic defenses of our traditional turf. We hoped instead to offer a measured alternative: recognizing that some compression of English literature might be necessary to the MLA’s aims, we wished to see that compression distributed evenly across periods before 1800. We also wished to encourage fuller application of the vey laudable principles governing restructuring. If anything the proposed changes do not go anywhere near far enough, especially in American literature, to create an association, and a convention, dispensing with a privileging of the Anglo-American tradition.
So we would like to see the committee go much further than it has done. But further must not mean focusing compression in early periods. If the MLA becomes an association of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it will focus its attention on precisely on the historical moment of European and American hegemony. In their multi-polarity, the medieval and early modern periods show us that it was not always so.
Though I cannot speak for every member of the Milton Society executive, I stand by the principles that guided our position and take some pride in the fact that we considered more than our immediate interests.

And yet, Professor Mohamed, your position serves your field’s interests rather well, since it retains intact the original numbers and even titles of divisions in the Early Modern Period. The proposed restructuring pits early fields against one another in a zero sum game. And it is quite disheartening to see that whereas scholars of the eighteenth century are uniformly horrified at the idea that the 17th century should cease to be represented at the MLA, our defense of our own sub-discipline is felt to be conservative and opportunistic.

Let me agree with Sandra Macpherson in articulating my dismay that a robust defense of studying the past should somehow be conflated with defending or one’s turf or with political or intellectual conservatism (or for that matter that defending the MLA’s proposal puts one on the side of the angels, of progress, and of the unrepresented). As Deidre Lynch points out , the question is now whether the MLA will listen to the members whose opinions it solicited. If the Milton Society prefers to roll up the carpet on its period, that is its own business with respect to its own division, tragic and misguided as I might think it to be. However, every single member of the Restoration and Early Eighteenth-Century Division and Later Eighteenth Century division alike objected to the merger proposed in paragraphs 81 and 82, and did so in eloquent, intellectually expansive, and passionate terms. For the MLA to proceed to merge those two divisions would be to flaunt the very process it instigated and to violate the democratic procedures it ostensibly upholds. It would permanently alienate every member of the divisions.

Professor Mohamed: We agree that any needed compression should not be distributed in an imbalanced way within early periods, and I think posts on this paragraph from Catherine Ingrassia, Misty Anderson, Dave Mazella, Samara Cahill, Sandra Macpherson, Jonathan Kramnick, and others are trying to speak to this very matter. With all due respect, people whose professional profiles (their research, their teaching) encompass the breadth of the period called The Restoration — which comprises almost half of “The 17th Century” and has actual continuities with the 18th century — cannot be justly accused of “clutter[ing] the MLA Commons with histrionic defenses of our traditional turf.” For one thing, this is a “Commons.” This is a place for (civil) speech; one person’s speech is not more cluttery than another person’s. Some posts may be more or less civil than others. Some may be more or less transparent than others. Or whathaveyou. But not cluttery. Second, there are very few posts on the Commons that do not show evidence of “self-interest” (as Sandra Macpherson points out); in our case, I believe it would be accurate to say that we respect the integrity of the Restoration as a distinct period that has distinct extensions into the early eighteenth century. Third, references to “turf” do often sound suspicious. But, you see, The Restoration is not “turf” any more than, say, “Romantic” or “Victorian” is “turf.” It’s what we work on, along with the early 18th century with which it has real continuities (the Later 18th Century should continue to have its own division, meanwhile, for its marked differences from the early part of the century). –Rivka Swenson (with apologies for any typos or other iPad-related infelicities)

Like many others, I reject Feisal G. Mohamed’s defense of the consolidation of Restoration into the 17th group. I would characterize his argument this way:
OUT OF A DISINTERESTED REGARD FOR ALL (“we opted not to clutter the MLA Commons with histrionic defenses of our traditional turf”) AND GROUNDED IN THE REPRESENTATIONAL LOGIC OF THE SUFFRAGE (“to create space for literary traditions underrepresented under the old structure”), AND A JUST RESENTMENT OF THE OLD HEGEMONY–“dispensing with a privileging of the Anglo-American tradition” the MANY scholars of the 16th through 18th century period of English literature, MUST BE SACRAFICED TO THE POLITICAL VIRTUE OF A FEW.Many years ago, Todd Gitlin had a nice way of characterizing the symbolic engine behind this “politics.” It is called MARCHING ON THE ENGLISH DEPARTMENT.

I’m not sure how to engage a scholar who informs me that defending the value of my scholarship, my scholarly field, and my scholarly community is a defense of “immediate interests.” So I will move instead to the points that I think are abundantly clear to all concerned in this proposed reorganization:

1. Merging divisions and reducing overall numbers of panels for eighteenth-century topics is hugely, massively, uniformly unpopular among the 18th century members of MLA. The pushback on this truly terrible idea is one of the most visible products of the convoluted and opaque online proposal review.

2. Sadly, the MLA leadership remains unwilling to acknowledge the highly public unhappiness of this segment of its membership with the proposal. For whatever reason, the MLA leadership insists on ignoring both the Exec Committees in charge of these 18c divisions and the rank and file comments here. What we have been seeing since the appearance of these proposals is a series of trial balloons that always end up rationalizing the same outcome: dividing up and reducing the contributions of 18c scholars to the MLA conference.

3. This insistence on ignoring the feedback given to their own proposals, and dismissing disagreement with restructuring as the pursuit of “immediate interests,” certainly makes 18c members of MLA question the commitment of this leadership to the principles of transparency and appropriate governance. Unless I see some evidence, very soon, that 18c MLA members’ views are being taken seriously enough to rethink this portion of the proposal, my conclusion would have to be that the MLA leadership is no longer acting as good stewards of the entire discipline.

4. As we all know from our experience in departments, colleges, and universities, self-divided units are much easier to defund and eliminate than united ones. It seems particularly strange to me that the MLA leadership at this time would embark on an initiative that would force fields to justify themselves at the expense of their colleagues and neighbors.

I do hope that the MLA leadership reconsiders the path it has taken with this, and begins to attend more closely to the very public feedback this part of proposal has provoked, from its own Divisions and from the rank and file. Thanks, DM

Bracketing my reaction to being called histrionic, can I simply point out that if we are, as we should be, interested in multi-polarity, than we *must* acknowledge the significance of the historical and cultural specificity of the Restoration by continuing its explicit representation within the MLA. Feminist orientalism, the prehistory of colonialism, Anglo-Ottoman relations, and a whole host of issues involving Islam and the “West” cannot be understood without a thorough familiarity with the Restoration and its aftermath.

I agree wholeheartedly with Jonathan Kramnick, Deidre Lynch, Sandra Macpherson, Misty Anderson, and so many others who have posted above. Eloquent, intellectually substantive accounts of the distinctness of the fields have emerged with force and conviction. It is hard to know what is more dismaying: a long, reasoned response that is dismissed as a self-interested defense of one turf or multiple long reasoned responses, absorbing the valuable hours of many brilliant scholars, set to the side because the “view of the commons” was not the view hoped for. I fear both are happening as I type.

I was last year’s president of the Milton Society of America, and I’m now no longer on the MSA executive committee. So I can only now speak as an individual seventeenth-century scholar. I do so to repeat my support, as stated yesterday, for the Restoration scholars keeping the integrity of their field in the new group structure. Like others I take exception to Feisal Mohamed’s apparent disregard for the legitimate scholarly objectives of the Restoration scholars.

I too want to see the incorporation of marginalized, new or hitherto ignored areas of study. Some more creative thinking about what the actual finite boundaries of the convention might be is now needed, and the MLA officers will I hope honor the interests of the members and not ride roughshod over them.

I’m not clear about what’s being proposed here—two groups in British Renaissance, one called “16th-Century British” and another called “17th-Century British” plus a Shakespeare group that already exists? Is that what’s being proposed?

Thanks for this comment–and thanks to all of you who’ve written in on so far on the truly difficult issues of naming and conceptualizing periods (or period-parts) in the British medieval/early modern [Renaissance]/18th century era(s)–or what I think of, when I’m lying awake at night worry about taxonomic issues, as the era of the “first half of the Brit. Lit survey,” or the “set of courses” dealing with the “old” past. The specific answer to your question is that members of the two “blue” groups provisionally called “16th century British” and “17th century British” are being asked whether they wish to remain divided at the 1600 line or whether they would consider merging to become one entity, the “green” one provisionally called British Early Modern. “Shakespeare,” like “Chaucer,” would remain an independent group within the (potentially more fluid) MLA group structure (fluid because of the 5 year review/self study requirement and because of the new opportunities for intra and inter group communication on the Commons). Meanwhile, Milton (like Wordsworth, Dante, and others) would still command “guaranteed sessions” through the Allied Organization devoted to his works.

A more general and contextualizing answer to your question about what’s being proposed can be found in Marianne Hirsch’s video and our introductory letter. Since I myself am an early modernist (trained as a medievalist and also happy–and unhappy–to be known as a “Reformation, Renaissance, and/or Restoration” scholar-teacher), I’d like to say that I’m very eager to hear my fellow scholars’ ideas on whether there are other possible configurations of our field(s) than the ones the Working Group has come up with. If you’ve had a chance now to think about our period(s) in relation to the revised map of the larger intellectual structure, what would you propose?

I agree that it would be a terrible idea to merge “Restoration and Early Eighteenth-Century British” and “Late Eighteenth-Century British” into one enormous “Long Eighteenth Century” division. Personally, I think that the current divisions already flatten out important differences. I would prefer three divisions: “Restoration English Literature (1660-1700),” “Early Eighteenth-Century British Literature (1700-1740)” and “Later Eighteenth-Century British Literature” (1740-1800).” That would better reflect the taxonomy actually in place in this rich, complex, and thriving field. (It would also do a better job of recognizing that Great Britain did not exist as a sovereign state before 1707.)

As an ex-member of the Division Executive Committee for Restoration and Early Eighteenth-Century English Literature and as an active participant at MLA Conventions for the past several decades now, I agree that the proposed collapsing/erasure would dramatically and disproportionately affect the participation of scholars in this field, and I oppose this part of the MLA’s proposal in the strongest possible terms.

I think it is a terrible idea to join “Restoration and Early 18th-Century British” and “Late 18th-Century British” into one “Long Eighteenth Century” division. It would be a tragedy to lose the MLA imprint on the Restoration as a distinct component of the early part of our period, a component with both an integral literary historical logic and deep critical tradition. It would also be a shame for eighteenth-century studies at large to lose half its panels.

I want to agree in the strongest possible terms with Jonathan Kramnick. I see no good reason for this change, which creates an incoherent and unwieldy period of study that pays no attention to unifying features and marked changes in sensibility and aesthetic preferences. The Restoration and the early 18th century (until say 1714, the beginning of the Hanoverian dynasty, or until 1740, with the “rise of the novel”) feature literary-historical continuities that need to be studied, just as the latter half of the 18th century has distinct features and interests that make it a period that requires special attention. Why is the 18th Century being marginalized this way?

I agree with Jonathan Kramnick and other scholars who commented earlier that combining “Restoration” with “Late Eighteenth Century British” into one “Long Eighteenth Century” division would have a lasting detrimental effect on the field of eighteenth-century studies. It will affect the most vulnerable part of membership–graduate students–who will have fewer opportunities to present their work at the MLA. At this early point in their career, few of them can yet benefit from the various interdisciplinary discussion groups/divisions, because both their scholarship and their market concerns are still mostly defined by their historical period.

First of all, thank you to the organizers for the incredible work that’s gone into this, and many of these proposed changes are wonderful — and long overdue! About the “Restoration” period, however, I’d like to issue a note of caution. The issue that Prof. Luxon raises is a very real one, but not, I think, exclusive to Milton. By separating “The Long 18th Century” from “British Early Modern” as proposed seems like it could endanger the visibility of the entire Restoration period. I don’t know of two people who agree on the boundaries of “The Long Eighteenth Century,” and it’s a term that many scholars are suspicious of or outright reject. I’m not sure what the rationale was behind this change, and I can’t imagine what constraints motivated this proposal (I’m sure they’re real and significant), but I’d ask that it be looked at again to ensure that “The Long Eighteenth Century” is in fact a meaningful category. My initial reaction is to be suspicious of this change, and I bet I’m not alone among scholars of the period.

I would like to echo the concerns raised by Tom Luxon and Joseph Kramnick. The inclusion of the Restoration in a division with the Early 18th Century was already somewhat uncomfortable. If this proposal to create an even longer 18th C is enacted along with the proposal in paragraph 80 to combine “17th Century British” with “Renaissance Lit excluding Shakespeare,” Milton seems stranded once again between a “Long 18th C” and “British Early Modern.” Neither division title adequate fits Milton’s works nor a majority of Restoration literature. As Michael Gavin notes, these combinations and the resulting obscurity of the Restoration is an issue that should concern more than only Milton scholars.

I too object to flattening the historical distinctions between the late Stuart period (Restoration and early 18th) century into a “long” 18th c category. As Jonathan has pointed out, the period has a distinct, rich, and influential literary tradition that merits distinct attention at least as much as Romanticism. Moreover, it is a tradition whose depth and global reach we are just beginning to grasp. A quick glance at ongoing projects in the period reveals the ways scholars who focus on the Restoration are working with social and political historians, epistemologists and historians of sciences to reconfigure the way we understand literature’s interaction with emergent science, social policy, and politica